Then when St. George became
impregnable to his attacks, Marlboro' pulled his blonde moustache
savagely, and grew sullen, and fortunately Eloise did not try to dispel
the cloud. Nevertheless, Marlboro' fancied that he perceived victory
hovering nearer to St. George than himself, and a rivalry begun in
good-humor was likely to take a different cast. In his pique, Marlboro'
bade his host farewell, and returned to Blue Bluffs; but it was idle
riding, for every day found him again at The Rim, like the old riddle,--
"All saddled, all bridled, all fit for a fight,"
and constant as the magnet to its poles.
It was still the steps of Eloise that Marlboro' haunted. Yesterday, he
brought songs to teach her, and among them the chant to which long ago
they had once listened together in the old Norman cathedral; to-morrow,
he would show her a singular deposit on the beach, of rare silvery
shells underflushed with rose, kept there over a tide for her eyes;
to-day, he treated her to politics condensed into a single phrase whose
essence told all his philosophy:--"The great error in government," he
said, "is also inversely the great want in marriage: in government,
individuality should be supreme; in marriage, lost. In government, this
error is a triple-headed monster: centralization, consolidation, union.
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