Chapter 5 - Page 2

be unspeakably
clever; he was fond of London, fond of books, of intellectual
society and of the idea of a political career. That such a man
should be at the same time fond of Flora Saunt attested, as the
phrase in the first volume of Gibbon has it, the variety of his
inclinations. I was soon to learn that he was fonder of her than
of all the other things together. Betty, one of five and with
views above her station, was at any rate felt at home to have
dished herself by her perversity. Of course no one had looked at
her since and no one would ever look at her again. It would be
eminently desirable that Flora should learn the lesson of Betty's
fate.

I was not struck, I confess, with all this in my mind, by any
symptom on our young lady's part of that sort of meditation. The
one moral she saw in anything was that of her incomparable aspect,
which Mr. Dawling, smitten even like the railway porters and the
cabmen by the doom-dealing gods, had followed from London to Venice
and from Venice back to London again. I afterwards learned that
her version of this episode was profusely inexact: his personal
acquaintance with her had been determined by an accident remarkable
enough, I admit, in connexion with what had gone before--a
coincidence at all events superficially striking. At Munich,
returning from a tour in the Tyrol with two of his sisters, he had
found himself at the table d'hote of his inn opposite to the full
presentment of that face of which the mere clumsy copy had made him
dream and desire. He had been tossed by it to a height so
vertiginous as to involve a retreat from the board; but the next
day he had dropped with a resounding thud at the very feet of his
apparition. On the following, with an equal incoherence, a
sacrifice even of his bewildered sisters, whom he left behind, he
made an heroic effort to escape by flight from a fate of which he
had already felt the cold breath. That fate, in London, very
little later, drove him straight before it--drove him one Sunday
afternoon, in the rain, to the door of the Hammond Synges. He
marched in other words close up to the cannon that was to blow him
to pieces. But three weeks, when he reappeared to me, had elapsed
since then, yet (to vary my metaphor) the burden he was to carry
for the rest of his days was firmly lashed to his back. I don't
mean by this that Flora had been persuaded to contract her scope; I
mean that he had been treated to the unconditional snub which, as
the event was to show, couldn't have been bettered as a means of
securing him. She hadn't calculated, but she had said "Never!" and
that word had made a bed big enough for his long-legged patience.
He became from this moment to my mind the interesting figure in the