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and that thebook and the flowers were far more a testimony to his wretchedness than the woman in the next room. Failure lay all around him. He had inherited a property, and the property had crumbled to ashes in his hands. He had married a wife, and Dr. Conolly would say only that extreme caution and tender ministrations might yet produce a favourable result. At any rate, Mr. Ireland assured himself, there should be no more pretence, whether as regarded himself or the world at large. The house in Eccleston Square was shut and the servants were paid off, the gardens where he had been wont to walk on summer afternoons given up to nursemaids and their charges, and Mr. and Mrs. Ireland departed to Suffolk and fell altogether out of the life they had known.
    It may be wondered whether there is anything more instructive than the person who disappears in this way. A man pursues his professional calling in a certain street, let us say, for twenty years, eats his dinner in a certain chophouse, talks with certain cronies and then, mysteriously, is gone. Who notices his passing or remembers him? The agent’s board is up above his chambers for a fortnight until a new tenant engages them, the waiter at the chophouse regrets his patron for a day or so—that is all. So it was with the Irelands. Such of their friends as wrote letters received courteous but unforthcoming replies. A pertinacious gentleman who proposed a visit was told roundly that the state of Mrs. Ireland’s health would not permit it. And thus the Irelands slipped altogether out of view, so that they might have died or followed the emigrant trail to Oregon for all that anyone knew. For there are some mysteries that are always hidden, and some secrets that are forever kept.
    FROM GEORGE ELIOT’S JOURNAL
     
22 March 1862
    A bright day of radiant sunshine, not the least inclemency. George engrossed in literary tasks, articles for the Cornhill, writing to Mr. Martin anent his translations &c. I, having no other occupation, spent the afternoon in reverie, reading Mr. Hutton in the Spectator —atleast I supposed it were Mr. Hutton—on Arnold’s last words on translating Homer. Thence to dine with the Irelands at their house in Eccleston Square. This I was interested to see: a pleasant, commodious residence, the rooms all crammed with dull, old furniture, scarlet draperies. A profusion of mirrors, many portraits of old gentlemen in periwigs. A dozen of us sat down: a sucking barrister from Lincoln’s Inn, Mr. Masson who writes for the magazines and a silent wife, a literary man whom George recalled from some endeavour lost in time. With Mr. Ireland I was, of course, familiar. A conventional kind of a man, I should suppose: tall, ruddy-faced, soft-spoken, talking a little of his property in Suffolk (it is embarrassed, George says, and a source of shame to him) and equestrian pleasures, solicitous of his wife. I acknowledge freely that it was she to whom my eye turned the more often: a slight, sorrowful woman with exquisite (there is no other word) red hair—I would have run my hands through it, negotiated to buy it at six shillings the yard like some Russian huckster—in whom deep reservoirs of feeling contended with the topics of the day. In short, a decidedly unusual representative of the female species, and yet some deep unhappiness so manifest in her that it pained the heart to see. Thus, on my asking would she and her husband go away this season, she replied with great emphasis, Go away? Why, I have been drifting rudderless for too long. This seemed such a singular expression that I enquired, what did she mean by it? She replied with perfect politeness and yet, it seemed to me, great private misgivings that there were times when she felt like a boat rowing on the ebb tide and could not for the life of her steer herself to safety. Mr. Ireland, I saw, was watching her closely and here interjected, “My wife has peculiar fancies, Miss Evans.” Although there was suavity