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contemplating matrimony.
    Sir Clement, of course, had disapproved most heartily. James Tresilian, though some years Valentine’s senior, had been his nearest friend since boyhood; and after this episode, one of Sir Clement’s prohibitions might easily have been expected. Yet Mr Tresilian’s fall so perfectly vindicated Sir Clement’s beliefs about the consequences of wilful independence that he could not have borne to exclude him from his circle: to forgo the pleasure of saying, with a shake of his head, ‘Ah! here’s poor Tresilian – an example to us all, alas’; of moralising on Mr Tresilian’s hollow cheek and muted manner; and above all of making his unfailing jests on the way in which the ill-fated attachment had begun.
    Mr Tresilian, walking along the sea-front at Teignmouth, had rescued the young lady’s hat, which had been carried away by the wind. This simple circumstance never lost its power to elicit Sir Clement’s brittle mirth. ‘Ah, Tresilian,’ he would say, ‘you have learned your lesson, I think, and will not go chasing hats again, hey?’; and if ever he heard in the neighbourhood of a rash or imprudent marriage – and to Sir Clement virtually all marriages were such – he would sweeten his outrage with the reflection: ‘Someone has been chasing flying hats again – poor fool!’ By the time of Sir Clement’s death, the incident of Mr Tresilian’s marriage was some seven or eight years in the past; Mr Tresilian had gone on with his solitary life, prospered, and ceased to be an object of general interest, but Sir Clement persisted in his acid pleasantries to the end.
    Fortunately Mr Tresilian was a man of imperturbable temperament, who responded to the harshest of Sir Clement’s sallies with his characteristic half-smile. Loyalty to Valentine, to whom he stood in something of the relation of an elder brother, perhaps accounted for it; but there might also have been a wish to see this relation made real. – He had a younger sister, Kate: a shy though not awkward girl, much accustomed to rely on his protection. A year or so ago, she and Valentine had danced much together at one of the rare assemblies the young Carnells were suffered to attend; and afterwards, the time being February, she had sent him a Valentine verse, partly inspired, it seemed, by the aptness of his name. This for Sir Clement was unthinkably bold, even if undertaken in playful fashion; yet it served as a useful warning. Well set up and respectable the Tresilians might be, but Sir Clement made it clear that when the time came for the heir of Pennacombe to marry, he must aim at a connection much superior to that .
    What Valentine felt Louisa could not quite tell: that he was flattered was no less plain than that he was embarrassed; and Louisa suspected that he shared his father’s views at least in this: that he did not look to find romantic attachment so close to home. His was an expansive and idealising temperament. ‘When I marry,’ he had once said to her, ‘but then, you know, even to say those words indicates a dismal state of comfortable preparation. One cannot prepare – expect – anticipate. There is no planning an event that must begin like lightning striking from the sky, overturning and oversetting everything.’
    Whether Kate Tresilian had intended a declaration, or whether Mr Tresilian still entertained any hopes in that direction, Louisa again could not tell. – Kate had returned to shyness, and he was always impossible to read. He was an odd, whimsical character; though gentleman-like, more at ease with sea-captains and ship’s-chandlers than in society; and though Louisa liked him, was often amused by him and valued the unobtrusive friendship he had always shown to Valentine, she could not help but secretly deplore the spiritless way he submitted to her father’s facetious contempt. He possessed fortune and independence, and owed Sir Clement nothing; and she for one did not consider those events