idea; and time lost, work lost, good counsel to the nation lost,
represented horrid vacuity to him, and called up the counter
demonstration of a dance down the halls of madness, for proof that we
should, at least, have jolly motion of limbs there before Perdition
struck the great gong. Ay, and we should be twirling with a fair form on
the arm: woman and man; as it ought to be; twirling downward, true, but
together. Such a companionship has a wisdom to raise it above the title
of madness. Name it, heartily, pleasure; and in contempt of the moralist
burgess, praise the dance of a woman and the man together high over a
curmudgeonly humping solitariness, that won't forgive an injury, nurses
rancour, smacks itself in the face, because it can't--to use the old
schoolboy words--take a licking!

These were the huddled, drunken sensations and thoughts entertained by
Weyburn, without his reflecting on the detachment from his old hero, of
which they were the sign. He criticized impulsively, and fancied he did
no more, and was not doing much though, in fact, criticism is the end of
worship; the Brutus blow at that Imperial but mortal bosom.

The person criticized was manifest. Who was the woman he twirled with?
She was unfeatured, undistinguished, one of the sex, or all the sex: the
sex to be shunned as our deadly sapper of gain, unless we find the chosen
one to super-terrestrialize it and us, and trebly outdo our gift of our
whole self for her.

She was indistinguishable, absolutely unknown; yet she murmured, or
seemed to murmur--for there was no sound--a complaint of Lord Ormont.
And she, or some soundless mouth of woman, said he was a splendid
military hero, a chivalrous man, a man of inflexible honour; but had no
understanding of how to treat a woman, or belief in her having equal life