he has? - literary fame, and bachelor's chambers,
and a chop-house, and the rest of it.«
    She knew; and thinking differently in the matter of literary fame, she
flushed, and ashamed of the flush, frowned.
    He bent over to her with the perusing earnestness of a gentleman about to
trifle.
    »You cannot intend that frown?«
    »Did I frown?«
    »You do.«
    »Now?«
    »Fiercely.«
    »Oh!«
    »Will you smile to reassure me?«
    »Willingly, as well as I can.«
    A gloom overcame him. With no woman on earth did he shine so as to recall to
himself seigneur and dame of the old French Court, as he did with Lætitia Dale.
He did not wish the period revived, but reserved it as a garden to stray into
when he was in the mood for displaying elegance and brightness in the society of
a lady; and in speech Lætitia helped him to the nice delusion. She was not
devoid of grace of bearing either.
    Would she preserve her beautiful responsiveness to his ascendancy? Hitherto
she had, and for years, and quite fresh. But how of her as a married woman? Our
souls are hideously subject to the conditions of our animal nature! A wife,
possibly mother, it was within sober calculation that there would be great
changes in her. And the hint of any change appeared a total change to one of the
lofty order who, when they are called on to relinquish possession instead of
aspiring to it, say, All or nothing!
    Well, but if there was danger of the marriage-tie effecting the slightest
alteration of her character or habit of mind, wherefore press it upon a
tolerably hardened spinster!
    Besides, though he did once put her hand in Vernon's for the dance, he
remembered acutely that the injury then done by his generosity to his tender
sensitiveness had sickened and tarnished the effulgence of two or three
successive anniversaries of his coming of age. Nor had he altogether yet got
over the passion of greed for the whole group of the well-favoured of the fair
sex, which in his early youth had made it bitter for him to submit to the
fickleness, not to say immodest fickleness, of any handsome one of them in
yielding her hand to a man and suffering herself to be led away. Ladies whom he
had only heard of as ladies of some beauty, incurred his wrath for having lovers
or taking husbands. He was of a vast embrace; and do not exclaim, in
covetousness; -