In fact, his emancipation from sentiment inspired the genial mood to
tease. Women, having to encounter a male adept at the weapon for the
purpose, must be either voluble or supportingly proud to keep the skin
from shrinking: which is a commencement of the retrogression; and that
has frequently been the beginning of a rout. Now the Countess Livia was
a lady of queenly pose and the servitorial conventional speech likely at
a push to prove beggarly. When once on a common platform with a man of
agile tongue instigated by his intellectual demon to pursue inquiries
into her moral resources, after a ruthless exposure of the wrecked
material, she would have to be, after the various fashions, defiant,
if she was to hold her own against pressure; and seeing, as she must,
the road of prudence point to conciliation, it was calculable that she
would take it. Hence a string of possible events, astounding to mankind,
but equally calculable, should one care to give imagination headway.
Gower looked signally Captain Abrane's 'fiddler' while he waited at
Livia's house door. A studious intimacy with such a lady was rather like
the exposure of the silver moon to the astronomer's telescope.

The Dame will have nought of an interview and colloquy not found
mentioned in her collection of ballads, concerning a person quite
secondary in Dr. Glossop's voluminous papers. She as vehemently
prohibits a narration of Gower Woodseer's proposal some hours later,
for the hand of the Countess of Fleetwood's transfixed maid Madge,
because of the insignificance of the couple; and though it was a quaint
idyll of an affection slowly formed, rationally based while seeming
preposterous, tending to bluntly funny utterances on both sides. The
girl was a creature of the enthusiasms, and had lifted that passion of
her constitution into higher than the worship of sheer physical bravery.
She had pitied Mr. Gower Woodseer for his apparently extreme, albeit