Mrs. Mountstuart and Sir Willoughby "Good morning, my dear Mrs. Mountstuart," Sir Willoughby wakened himself to address the great lady. "Why has she fled?"
"Has any one fled?"
"Laetitia Dale."
"Letty Dale? Oh, if you call that flying. Possibly to renew a close conversation with Vernon Whitford, that I cut short. You frightened me with your 'Shepherds-tell-me' air and tone. Lead me to one of your garden-seats: out of hearing to Dr. Middleton, I beg. He mesmerizes me, he makes me talk Latin. I was curiously susceptible last night. I know I shall everlastingly associate him with an abortive entertainment and solos on big instruments. We were flat."
"Horace was in good vein."
"You were not."
"And Laetitia--Miss Dale talked well, I thought."
"She talked with you, and no doubt she talked well. We did not mix. The yeast was bad. You shot darts at Colonel De Craye: you tried to sting. You brought Dr. Middleton down on you. Dear me, that man is a reverberation in my head. Where is your lady and love?"
"Who?"
"Am I to name her?"
"Clara? I have not seen her for the last hour. Wandering, I suppose.
"A very pretty summer bower," said Mrs. Mountstuart, seating herself "Well, my dear Sir Willoughby, preferences, preferences are not to be accounted for, and one never knows whether to pity or congratulate, whatever may occur. I want to see Miss Middleton."
"Your 'dainty rogue in porcelain' will be at your beck--you lunch with us?--before you leave."
"So now you have taken to quoting me, have you?"
"But 'a romantic tale on her eyelashes' is hardly descriptive any longer."
"Descriptive of whom? Now you are upon Laetitia Dale!"
"I quote you generally. She has now a graver look."
"And well may have!"
"Not that the romance has entirely disappeared."
"No; it looks as if it were in print."
"You have hit it perfectly, as usual, ma'am."
Sir Willoughby mused.
Like one resuming his instrument to take up the melody in a concerted piece, he said: "I thought Laetitia Dale had a singularly animated air last night."
"Why!--" Mrs. Mountstuart mildly gaped.
"I want a new description of her. You know, I collect your mottoes and sentences."
"It seems to me she is coming three parts out of her shell, and wearing it as a hood for convenience."
"Ready to issue forth at an invitation? Admirable! exact!"
"Ay, my good Sir Willoughby, but are we so very admirable and exact? Are we never to know our own minds?"
He produced a polysyllabic sigh, like those many-jointed compounds of poets in happy languages, which are copious in a single expression: "Mine is known to me. It always has been. Cleverness in women is not uncommon. Intellect is the pearl. A woman of intellect is as good as a Greek statue; she is divinely wrought, and she is divinely rare."
"Proceed," said the lady, confiding a cough to the air.
"The rarity of it: and it is not mere intellect, it is a sympathetic intellect; or else it is an intellect in perfect accord with an intensely sympathetic disposition;--the rarity of it makes it too precious to be parted with when once we have met it. I prize it the more the older I grow."
"Are we on the feminine or the neuter?"
"I beg pardon?"
"The universal or the individual?"
He shrugged. "For the rest, psychological affinities may exist coincident with and entirely independent of material or moral prepossessions, relations, engagements, ties."
"Well, that is not the raving of passion, certainly," said Mrs Mountstuart, "and it sounds as if it were a comfortable doctrine for men. On that plea, you might all of you be having Aspasia and a wife. We saw your fair Middleton and Colonel de Craye at a distance as we entered the park. Professor Crooklyn is under some hallucination."
"What more likely?"
The readiness and the double-bearing of the reply struck her comic sense with awe.
"The Professor must hear that. He insists on the fly, and the inn, and the wet boots, and the warming mixture, and the testimony of the landlady and the railway porter."
"I say, what more likely?"
"Than that he should insist?"
"If he is under the hallucination!"
"He may convince others."
"I have only to repeat. . ."
"'What more likely?' It's extremely philosophical. Coincident with a pursuit of the psychological affinities."
"Professor Crooklyn will hardly descend, I suppose, from his classical altitudes to lay his hallucinations before Dr.
Middleton?"
"Sir Willoughby, you are the pink of chivalry!"
By harping on Laetitia, he had emboldened Mrs. Mountstuart to lift the curtain upon Clara. It was offensive to him, but the injury done to his pride had to be endured for the sake of his general plan of self-protection.
"Simply desirous to save my guests from annoyance of any kind", he said. "Dr Middleton can look 'Olympus and thunder', as Vernon calls it."
"Don't. I see him. That look! It is Dictionary-bitten! Angry, homed Dictionary!--an apparition of Dictionary in the night--to a dunce!"
"One would undergo a good deal to avoid the sight."
"What the man must be in a storm! Speak as you please of yourself: you are a true and chivalrous knight to dread it for her. But now, candidly, how is it you cannot condescend to a little management?
Listen to an old friend. You are too lordly. No lover can afford to be incomprehensible for half an hour. Stoop a little.
Sermonizings are not to be thought of. You can govern unseen. You are to know that I am one who disbelieves in philosophy in love. I admire the look of it, I give no credit to the assumption. I rather like lovers to be out at times: it makes them picturesque, and it enlivens their monotony. I perceived she had a spot of wildness. It's proper that she should wear it off before marriage."
"Clara? The wildness of an infant!" said Willoughby, paternally, musing over an inward shiver. "You saw her at a distance just now, or you might have heard her laughing. Horace diverts her excessively."