"No, Miss Ashton, I am not neglecting the lectures of Lady Forcar, but of late they have not been much concerned with man. I deeply deplore it, but she has taken to pigs. Anyway she would talk of nothing but pigs yesterday, at your mother's. And even the improvement of my mind does not come within her consideration under the head of pigs, although I begged of her to be gracious and let it."
"That is very sad indeed. You must feel sorely slighted. And what has she to say about pigs?"
"Oh, I really couldn't think of half the distractingly flattering things she has to say about them. She made me miserably jealous, I assure you. She says she is going to write an article for one of the heavy, of the very heaviest, magazines, and she is going to call her article 'Dead Pigs and the Pigs that eat them,' and such harmless people as you and I are to be considered among the latter class in the title. Isn't that fearful. She says from this forth, her mission is pigs."
"I shall certainly read this wonderful article when it appears," said the girl with a laugh. "Can you tell me anything more about this article?"
"No; except that it was Mr. Leigh started the subject between her and me."
"Mr. Leigh?" said Dora gravely.
"Yes. When she saw him eat all your bread and butter, she said he was a man who, in the hands of a clever wife, might act the part of a Napoleon the Great in social matters."
The grave look on Dora's face changed to one of sadness. At first, when Sir Julius mentioned the dwarf's name, she thought some unkind reference was about to be made to his unhappy physical deformities. Now her anxiety was relieved on that score only to have her feelings aroused anew over the spectacle of his spiritual desolation. He marry! How could he marry? And yet he had told them he had found the model for his Pallas-Athena. She was not so simple as to think the mere intellectual being was represented to him by the model for his Pallas-Athena. Suppose he used the name of Pallas-Athena only out of shyness for what struck him as mere loveliness in woman, mere good looks and kindliness of nature? What a heart-breaking thought! What an awful torture it must be to be hungry for love and beauty in such a form!
Sir Julius Whinfield left her at the house in Curzon Street, and she went up to her own room to change her dress. She had nothing arranged for between that and dinner. Her father had gone away on foot from the house, and her mother had taken the carriage before
luncheon to pay a visit to some people in whom Dora was not interested. The girl had all the afternoon to herself, and she had plenty of thought to occupy it. She threw herself in a large easy chair by the open window. Her room was at the back of the house, and looked out on a space of roofs and walls and tiny gardens. There was nothing in view to distract the eye. There was much within to exercise the spirit.
"It would be madness," was the result of deep and long thought, "to go any further. I like him well enough and admire him greatly, and I daresay-no, let me be quite candid-I _know_ he likes me. I daresay we are better disposed towards each other than one tenth of the people who marry, but that is not enough.
"We did not fall in love with one another at first sight. It was no boy and girl attachment. We were attracted towards one another by the intellectual sides of our characters. I thought I was wiser than other girls in not allowing my fancy to direct my fate. I thought he and I together might achieve great things. I am now afraid it is as great, even a greater, mistake to marry for intellect than to marry for money or position.
"I have made up my mind now. Nothing shall change me. My decision is as much for his good as my own. Last night was not the climax of what would be. It was only the first of a long line of difficulties or quarrels that would increase as time went on.
"We have been enduring one another out of admiration for one another, not loving one another for our own and love's own sake.
"It will cost me many a pang, but it must be done. I shall make no sign. I shall make no announcement. No one has been formally told we are engaged, and no one has any business to know. If people have guessed it, let them now guess the engagement has been broken off. I am not bound to enlighten them."
Then she rose and found materials for a letter, and wrote:
"Dear Mr. Hanbury,
"I have been thinking a great deal of the talk we had last night after dinner, and I have come to the conclusion that it was all for the best. We should never be able to agree. I think the least said now the better. Our engagement has not been announced to anyone. Nothing need be said about its being broken off. I hope this arrangement will be carried out with as little pain to either as possible. I shall not send you back your letters. I am sure getting back letters is always painful, and ought to be avoided. I shall burn yours, and I ask you to do the same with any notes you may have of mine. Neither will I return the few things that cannot be burned. None of them is, I think, of any intrinsic value to you beyond the value it had between you and me. I shall keep them for a week and then destroy them.