this view with many variations of pity. Merthyr's experience was tolerant
to the weaker vessel's young delight in power, which makes her sometimes,
though sweet and merciful by nature, enunciate Hebraic severities
oracularly. He smiled, and was never weary of pointing out practical
refutations. Whereat she said, "Will a thousand instances change the
principle?" When the brain, and especially the fine brain of a woman,
first begins to act for itself, the work is of heavy labour; she finds
herself plunging abroad on infinite seas, and runs speedily into the
anchorage of dogmas, obfuscatory saws, and what she calls principles.
Here she is safe; but if her thinking was not originally the mere action
of lively blood upon that battery of intelligence, she will by-and-by
reflect that it is not well for a live thing to be tied to a dead, and
that long clinging to safety confesses too much. Merthyr waited for
Georgians patiently. On all other points they were heart-in-heart. It
was her pride to say that she loved him with no sense of jealousy, and
prayed that he might find a woman, in plain words, worthy of him. This
woman had not been found; she confessed that she had never seen her.

Georgians received Captain Gambier's communication in Monmouth. Merthyr
had now and then written of a Miss Belloni; but he had seemed to refer to
a sort of child, and Georgians had looked on her as another Italian
pensioner. She was decisive. The moment she awoke to feel herself
brooding over the thought of this girl, she started to join Merthyr.
Solitude is pasturage for a suspicion. On her way she grew persuaded
that her object was bad, and stopped; until the thought came, 'If he is
in a dilemma, who shall help him save his sister?' And, with spiritually
streaming eyes at a vision of companionship broken (but whether by his
taking another adviser, or by Miss Belloni, she did not ask), Georgiana
continued her journey.