have silenced Mr. Manx with the posing interrogation: Why have
I so long consented to put myself at the mercy of a bore? For him, he could not
answer it, though Manx, as leader of the Shipping interest, was influential. The
man had to be endured, like other doses in politics.
    Dacier did not once think of the great ship-owner's niece till Miss
Constance Asper stepped into her drawing-room to welcome him. She was an image
of repose to his mind. The calm pure outline of her white features refreshed him
as the Alps the Londoner newly alighted at Berne; smoke, wrangle, the wrestling
city's wickedness, behind him.
    »My uncle is very disturbed,« she said. »Is the news - if I am not very
indiscreet in inquiring?«
    »I have a practice of never paying attention to newspaper articles,« Dacier
replied.
    »I am only affected by living with one who does,« Miss Asper observed, and
the lofty isolation of her head above politics gave her a moral attractiveness
in addition to physical beauty. Her water-colour sketches were on her uncle's
walls: the beautiful in nature claimed and absorbed her. She dressed with a
pretty rigour, a lovely simplicity, picturesque of the nunnery. She looked
indeed a high-born young lady-abbess.
    »It's a dusty game for ladies,« Dacier said, abhorring the women defiled by
it.
    And when one thinks of the desire of men to worship women, there is a pathos
in a man's discovery of the fair young creature undefiled by any interest in
public affairs, virginal amid her bower's environments.
    The angelical beauty of a virgin mind and person captivated him, by
contrast. His natural taste was to admire it, shunning the lures and tangles of
the women on high seas, notably the married: who, by the way, contrive to
ensnare us through wonderment at a cleverness caught from their traffic with the
masculine world: often - if we did but know! - a parrot-repetition of the last
male visitor's remarks. But that which the fair maiden speaks, though it may be
simple, is her own.
    She too is her own: or vowed but to one. She is on all sides impressive in
purity. The world worships her as its perfect pearl: and we are brought
refreshfully to acknowledge that the world is right.
    By contrast, the white radiation of Innocence distinguished Constance Asper
celestially. As he was well aware, she had long preferred him - the