This with her was not art, but necessity; yet the most accomplished art could have devised nothing so effectual to hold her lover. His strong sense had always protected him from the tricks of matchmaking mammas and their guileless maids. Had Emilia made one effort to please him, once concealed a dislike, once affected a preference, the spell might have been broken. Had she been his slave, he might have become a very unyielding or a very heedless despot. Making him her slave, she kept him at the very height of bliss. This king of railways and purchaser of statesmen, this man who made or wrecked the fortunes of others by his whim, was absolutely governed by a reckless, passionate, inexperienced, ignorant girl. And this passion was made all the stronger by being a good deal confined to his own breast. Somehow it was very hard for him to talk sentiment to Emilia; he instinctively saw she disliked it, and indeed he liked her for not approving the stiff phrases which were all he could command. Nor could he find any relief of mind in talking with others about her. It enraged him to be clapped on the back and congratulated by his compeers; and he stopped their coarse jokes, often rudely enough. As for the young men at the club, he could not bear to hear them mention his darling’s name, however courteously. He knew well enough that for them the betrothal had neither dignity nor purity; that they held it to be as much a matter of bargain and sale as their worst amours. He would far rather have talked to the theological professors whose salaries he paid, for he saw that they had a sort of grave, formal tradition of the sacredness of marriage. And he had a right to claim that to him it was sacred, at least as yet; all the ideal side of his nature was suddenly developed; he walked in a dream; he even read Tennyson. Sometimes he talked a little to his future brother-in-law, Harry,--assuming, as lovers are wont, that brothers see sisters on their ideal side. This was quite true of Harry and Hope, but not at all true as regarded Emilia. She seemed to him simply a beautiful and ungoverned girl whom he could not respect, and whom he therefore found it very hard to idealize. Therefore he heard with a sort of sadness the outpourings of generous devotion from John Lambert. “I don’t know how it is, Henry,” the merchant would gravely say, “I can’t get rightly used to it, that I feel so strange. Honestly, now, I feel as if I was beginning life over again. It ain’t a selfish feeling, so I know there’s some good in it. I used to be selfish enough, but I ain’t so to her. You may not think it, but if it would make her happy, I believe I could lie down and let her carriage roll over me. By -----, I would build her a palace to live in, and keep the lodge at the gate myself, just to see her pass by. That is, if she was to live in it alone by herself. I couldn’t stand sharing her. It must be me or nobody.”