are making a push for importance in the kingdom!




CHAPTER XXXV

IN WHICH CERTAIN CHANGES MAY BE DISCERNED

Behind his white plaster of composure, Lord Fleetwood had alternately
raged and wondered during the passage of the Welsh cavalcade up Eastward:
a gigantic burlesque, that would have swept any husband of their heroine
off the scene had he failed to encounter it deferentially, preserving his
countenance and ostensibly his temper. An idiot of a woman, incurable in
her lunacy, suspects the father of the infant as guilty of designs done
to death in romances; and so she manages to set going solemnly a bigger
blazing Tom Fool's show than any known or written romance gives word of!
And that fellow, Gower Woodseer, pleads, in apology, for her husband's
confusion, physiologically, that it comes of her having been carried off
and kept a prisoner when she was bearing the child and knitting her whole
mind to ensure the child. But what sheer animals these women are, if
they take impressions in such a manner! And Mr. Philosopher argues that
the abusing of women proves the hating of Nature; names it 'the commonest
insanity, and the deadliest,' and men are 'planted in the bog of their
unclean animal condition until they do proper homage to the animal Nature
makes the woman be.' Oh, pish, sir!--as Meeson Corby had the habit of
exclaiming when Abrane's 'fiddler' argues him into a corner. The fellow
can fiddle fine things and occasionally clear sense:--'Men hating Nature
are insane. Women and Nature are close. If it is rather general to hate
Nature and maltreat women, we begin to see why the world is a mad world.'