“A great improvement.”

“Just so. Everyone says the same.”

Charles bit his lip. “And when am I going to meet the lady?”

“Indeed, I was coming to that. She is most anxious to get to know you. And Charles, most delicate in the matter of… well, the… how shall I put it?”

“Limitations of my prospects?”

“Just so. She confessed last week she first refused me for that very reason.” This was, Charles realized, supposed to be a commendation, and he showed a polite surprise. “But I assured her you had made an excellent match. And would understand and approve my choice of partner… for my last years.”

“You haven’t yet answered my question, Uncle.”

Sir Robert looked a little ashamed. “She is visiting family in Yorkshire. She is related to the Daubenys, you know.”

“Indeed.”

“I go to join her there tomorrow.”

“Ah.”

“And I thought it best to get it over man to man. But she is most anxious to meet you.” His uncle hesitated, then with a ludicrous shyness reached in his waistcoat pocket and produced a locket. “She gave me this last week.”

And Charles stared at a miniature, framed in gold and his uncle’s heavy fingers, of Mrs. Bella Tomkins. She looked disagreeably young; firm-lipped; and with assertive eyes—not at all unattractive, even to Charles. There was, curiously, some faint resemblance to Sarah in the face; and a subtle new dimension was added to Charles’s sense of humiliation and dispossession. Sarah was a woman of profound inexperience, and this was a woman of the world; but both in their very different ways—his uncle was right—stood apart from the great niminy-piminy flock of women in general. For a moment he felt himself like a general in command of a weak army looking over the strong dispositions of the enemy; he foresaw only too clearly the result of a confrontation between Ernestina and the future Lady Smithson. It would be a rout.

“I see I have further reason to congratulate you.”

“She’s a fine woman. A splendid woman. Worth waiting for, Charles.” His uncle dug him in the ribs. “You’ll be jealous. Just see if you won’t.” He gazed fondly again at the locket, then closed it reverentially and replaced it in his pocket. And then, as if to counteract the soft sop, he briskly made Charles accompany him to the stables to see his latest brood mare, bought for “a hundred guineas less than she was worth”; and which seemed a totally unconscious but distinct equine parallel in his mind to his other new acquisition.

They were both English gentlemen; and they carefully avoided further discussion of, if not further reference to (for Sir Robert was too irrepressibly full of his own good luck not to keep on harking back), the subject uppermost in both their minds. But Charles insisted that he must return to Lyme and his fiancee that evening; and his uncle, who in former days would, at such a desertion, have sunk into a black gloom, made no great demur now. Charles promised to discuss the matter of the Little House with Ernestina, and to bring her to meet the other bride-to-be as soon as could be conveniently arranged. But all his uncle’s last-minute warmth and hand-shaking could not disguise the fact that the old man was relieved to see the back of him.

Pride had buoyed Charles up through the three or four hours of his visit; but his driving away was a sad business. Those lawns, pastures, railings, landscaped groves seemed to slip through his fingers as they slipped slowly past his eyes. He felt he never wanted to see Winsyatt again. The morning’s azure sky was overcast by a high veil of cirrus, harbinger of that thunderstorm we have already heard in Lyme, and his mind soon began to plummet into a similar climate of morose introspection.

This latter was directed not a little against Ernestina. He knew his uncle had not been very impressed by her fastidious little London ways; her almost total lack of interest in rural life. To a man who had devoted so much of his life to breeding she must have seemed a poor new entry to such fine stock as the Smithsons. And then one of the bonds between uncle and nephew had always been their bachelorhood—perhaps Charles’s happiness had opened Sir Robert’s eyes a little: if he, why not I? And then there was the one thing about Ernestina his uncle had thoroughly approved of: her massive marriage portion. But that was precisely what allowed him to expropriate Charles with a light conscience.

But above all, Charles now felt himself in a very displeasing position of inferiority as regards Ernestina. His income from his father’s estate had always been sufficient for his needs; but he had not increased the capital. As the future master of Winsyatt he could regard himself as his bride’s financial equal; as a mere rentier he must become her financial dependent. In disliking this, Charles was being a good deal more fastidious than most young men of his class and age. To them dowry-hunting (and about this time, dollars began to be as acceptable as sterling) was as honorable a pursuit as fox-hunting or gaming. Perhaps that was it: he felt sorry for himself and yet knew very few would share his feeling. It even exacerbated his resentment that circumstances had not made his uncle’s injustice even greater: if he had spent more time at Winsyatt, say, or if he had never met Ernestina in the first place…

But it was Ernestina, and the need once again to show the stiff upper lip, that was the first thing to draw him out of his misery that day.

The door was opened by the housekeeper. The doctor, it seemed, was in his dispensary; but if Charles would like to wait upstairs… so, divested of his hat and his Inverness cape he soon found himself in that same room where he had drunk the grog and declared himself for Darwin. A fire burned in the grate; and evidence of the doctor’s solitary supper, which the housekeeper hastened to clear, lay on the round table in the bay window overlooking the sea. Charles very soon heard feet on the stairs. Grogan came warmly into the room, hand extended.

“This is a pleasure, Smithson. That stupid woman now—has she not given you something to counteract the rain?”

“Thank you…” he was going to refuse the brandy decanter, but changed his mind. And when he had the glass in his hand, he came straight out with his purpose. “I have something private and very personal to discuss. I need your advice.”

A little glint showed in the doctor’s eyes then. He had had other well-bred young men come to him shortly before their marriage. Sometimes it was gonorrhea, less often syphilis; sometimes it was mere fear, masturbation phobia; a widespread theory of the time maintained that the wages of self-abuse was impotence. But usually it was ignorance; only a year before a miserable and childless young husband had come to see Dr. Grogan, who had had gravely to explain that new life is neither begotten nor born through the navel.

“Do you now? Well I’m not sure I have any left—I’ve given a vast amount of it away today. Mainly concerning what should be executed upon that damned old bigot up in Marlborough House. You’ve heard what she’s done?”