Musically, it was perhaps as well, for the player’s inward tumult was so great, that what his hands did he hardly knew or cared. He felt himself the greatest criminal unhung. Saddenly, through all that wilful mist of epicurean feeling, which had been enwrapping him, there had pierced a sharp illumining beam from a girl’s eyes aglow with joy, with hope, with tenderness. In the name of Heaven, what had this growing degeneracy of every moral muscle led him to now? What! smile and talk, and smile--and be a villain all the time? What! encroach on a young life, like some creeping parasitic growth, taking all, able to give nothing in return--not even one genuine spark of genuine passion? Go philandering on till a child of nineteen shows you her warm impulsive heart, play on her imagination, on her pity, safe all the while in the reflection that by the next day you will be far away, and her task and yours will be alike to forget! He shrinks from himself as one shrinks from a man capable of injuring anything weak and helpless. To despise the world’s social code, and then to fall conspicuously below its simplest articles; to aim at being pure intelligence, pure open-eyed rationality, and not even to succeed in being a gentleman, as the poor commonplace world understands it! Oh, to fall at her pardon before parting for ever! But no--no more posing; no more dramatizing. How can he get away most quietly--make least sign? The thought of that walk home in the darkness fills him with a passion of irritable impatience. ‘Look at that Romney, Mr. Elsmere; just look at it!’ cried Dr. Meyrick excitedly; ‘did you ever see anything finer? There was one of those London dealer fellows down here last summer offered the Squire four thousand pounds down on the nail for it.’ In this way Meyrick had been taking Robert round the drawing-room, doing the honors of every stick and stone in it, his eyeglass in his eye, his thin old face shining with pride over the Wendover possessions. And so the two gradually neared the oriel where the Squire and Mr. Bickerton were standing. Robert was in twenty minds as to any further conversation with the Squire. After the ladies had gone, while every nerve in him was still tingling with anger, he had done his best to keep up indifferent talk on local matters with Mr. Bickerton. Inwardly he was asking himself whether he could ever sit at the Squire’s table and eat his bread again. It seemed to him that they had had a brush which would be difficult to forget. And as he sat there before the Squire’s wine, hot with righteous heat, all his grievances against the man and the landlord crowded upon him. A fig for intellectual eminence if it make a man oppress his inferiors and bully his equals!