Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 1.djvu/251

Rh perhaps not hitherto done justice; something of the impression that he had received, when he was younger, from showy "views" of fine country-seats, as if they had been brighter and more established than life. There were a couple of peacocks on the terrace, and his eye was caught by the gleam of the swans on a distant lake, where there was also a little temple on an island; and these objects fell in with his humour, which at another time might have been ruffled by them as representing the Philistine in ornament.

It was certainly a proof of youth and health on his part that his spirits had risen as the tumult rose and that after he had taken his jump into the turbid waters of a contested election he had been able to tumble and splash, not only with a sense of awkwardness but with a considerable capacity for the frolic. Tepid as we saw him in Paris he had found his relation to his opportunity surprisingly altered by his little journey across the Channel. He saw things in a new perspective and he breathed an air that excited him unexpectedly. There was something in it that went to his head—an element that his mother and his sisters, his father from beyond the grave, Julia Dallow, the Liberal party and a hundred friends were both secretly and overtly occupied in pumping into it. If he was vague about success he liked the fray, and he had a general rule that when one was in a muddle there was refreshment in action. The embarrassment, that is the revival of scepticism, which might produce an inconsistency shameful to exhibit and yet very difficult to conceal, was safe enough to come later: indeed at the risk of making our young man appear a purely whimsical personage I may hint that some such sickly glow