FLEEMING^S ENGAGEMENT lix 



of accompanying him to the door, announced ' That was what Fleem 

 young men were like in my time ' she could only reply, looking 

 on her handsome father, i I thought they had been better 

 looking.' 



This first visit to the Austins took place in 1855; and it 

 seems it was some time before Fleeming began to know his mind ; 

 and yet longer ere he ventured to show it. The corrected 

 quantity, to those who knew him well, will seem to have 

 played its part ; he was the man always to reflect over a correc- 

 tion and to admire the castigator. And fall in love he did ; 

 not hurriedly but step by step, not blindly but with critical 

 discrimination ; not in the fashion of Romeo, but before he was 

 done, with all Romeo's ardour and more than Romeo's faith. 

 The high favour to which he presently rose in the esteem of 

 Alfred Austin and his wife, might well give him ambitious 

 notions ; but the poverty of the present and the obscurity of 

 the future were there to give him pause ; and when his aspi- 

 rations began to settle round Miss Austin, he tasted, perhaps 

 for the only time in his life, the pangs of diffidence. There 

 was indeed opening before him a wide door of hope. He had 

 changed into the service of Messrs. Liddell & Gordon ; these 

 gentlemen had begun to dabble in the new field of marine 

 telegraphy ; and Fleeming was already face to face with his 

 life's work. That impotent sense of his own value, as of a 

 ship aground, which makes one of the agonies of youth, began 

 to fall from him. New problems which he was endowed to solve, 

 vistas of new enquiry which he was fitted to explore, opened 

 before him continually. His gifts had found their avenue and 

 goal. And with this pleasure of effective exercise, there must 

 have sprung up at once the hope of what is called by the 

 world success. But from these low beginnings, it was a far look 

 upward to Miss Austin : the favour of the loved one seems 

 always more than problematical to any lover; the consent 

 of parents must be always more than doubtful to a young 

 man with a small salary and no capital except capacity and hope. 

 But Fleeming was not the lad to lose any good thing for the lack 

 of trial ; and at length, in the autumn of 1857, this boyish-sized, 



