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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of One of Our Conquerors, Complete
+by George Meredith
+#82 in our series by George Meredith
+
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+Title: One of Our Conquerors, Complete
+
+Author: George Meredith
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+Release Date: September, 2003 [Etext #4476]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on February 19, 2002]
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+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
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+entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS, Complete
+
+By George Meredith
+
+1897
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+BOOK 1.
+I.        ACROSS LONDON BRIDGE
+II.       THROUGH THE VAGUE TO THE INFINITELY LITTLE
+III.      OLD VEUVE
+IV.       THE SECOND BOTTLE
+V.        THE LONDON WALK WESTWARD
+VI.       NATALY
+VII.      BETWEEN A GENERAL MAN OF THE WORLD AND A PROFESSIONAL
+VIII.     SOME FAMILIAR GUESTS.
+IX.       AN INSPECTION OF LAKELANDS
+X.        SKEPSEY IN MOTION
+XI.       WHEREIN WE BEHOLD THE COUPLE JUSTIFIED OF LOVE HAVING SIGHT OF
+          THEIR SCOURGE
+
+BOOK 2.
+XII.      TREATS OF THE DUMBNESS POSSIBLE WITH MEMBERS OF A HOUSEHOLD
+          HAVING ONE HEART
+XIII.     THE LATEST OF MRS. BURMAN
+XIV.      DISCLOSES A STAGE ON THE DRIVE TO PARIS
+XV.       A PATRIOT ABROAD
+XVI.      ACCOUNTS FOR SKEPSEY'S MISCONDUCT, SHOWING HOW IT AFFECTED
+          NATALY
+XVII.     CHIEFLY UPON THE THEME OF A YOUNG MAID'S IMAGININGS
+XVIII.    SUITORS FOR THE HAND OF NESTA VICTORIA
+
+BOOK 3.
+XIX.      TREATS OF NATURE AND CIRCUMSTANCE AND THE DISSENSION BETWEEN
+          THEM AND OF A SATIRIST'S MALIGNITY IN THE DIRECTION OF HIS
+          COUNTRY
+XX.       THE GREAT ASSEMBLY AT LAKELAND
+XXI.      DARTREY FENELLAN
+XXII.     CONCERNS THE INTRUSION OF JARNIMAN
+XXIII.    TREATS OF THE LADIES' LAPDOG TASSO FOR AN INSTANCE OF MOMENTOUS
+          EFFECTS PRODUCED BY VERY MINOR CAUSES
+XXIV.     NESTA'S ENGAGEMENT
+
+BOOK 4.
+XXV.      NATALY IN ACTION
+XXVI.     IN WHICH WE SEE A CONVENTIONAL GENTLE MAN ENDEAVOURING TO
+          EXAMINE A SPECTRE OF HIMSELF
+XXVII.    CONTAINS WHAT IS A SMALL THING OR A GREAT, AS THE SOUL OF THE
+          CHIEF ACTOR MAY DECIDE
+XXVIII.   MRS. MARSETT
+XXIX.     SHOWS ONE OF THE SHADOWS OF THE WORLD CROSSING A VIRGIN'S MIND
+XXX.      THE BURDEN UPON NESTA
+XXXI.     SHOWS HOW THE SQUIRES IN A CONQUEROR'S SERVICE HAVE AT TIMES TO
+          DO KNIGHTLY CONQUEST OF THEMSELVES
+XXXII.    SHOWS HOW TEMPER MAY KINDLE TEMPER AND AN INDIGNANT WOMAN GET
+          HER WEAPON
+XXXIII.   A PAIR OF WOOERS
+XXXIV.    CONTAINS DEEDS UNRELATED AND EXPOSITIONS OF FEELINGS
+XXXV.     IN WHICH AGAIN WE MAKE USE OF THE OLD LAMPS FOR LIGHTING AN
+          ABYSMAL DARKNESS
+
+BOOK 5.
+XXXVI.    NESTA AND HER FATHER
+XXXVII.   THE MOTHER--THE DAUGHTER
+XXXVIII.  NATALY, NESTA, AND DARTREY FENELLAN
+XXXIX.    A CHAPTER IN THE SHADOW OF MRS. MARSETT
+XL.       AN EXPIATION
+XLI.      THE NIGHT OF THE GREAT UNDELIVERED SPEECH
+XLII.     THE LAST
+
+
+
+
+
+ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS
+
+
+BOOK 1.
+
+I.        ACROSS LONDON BRIDGE
+II.       THROUGH THE VAGUE TO THE INFINITELY LITTLE
+III.      OLD VEUVE
+IV.       THE SECOND BOTTLE
+V.        THE LONDON WALK WESTWARD
+VI.       NATALY
+VII.      BETWEEN A GENERAL MAN OF THE WORLD AND A PROFESSIONAL
+VIII.     SOME FAMILIAR GUESTS.
+IX.       AN INSPECTION OF LAKELANDS
+X.        SKEPSEY IN MOTION
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+ACROSS LONDON BRIDGE
+
+A gentleman, noteworthy for a lively countenance and a waistcoat to match
+it, crossing London Bridge at noon on a gusty April day, was almost
+magically detached from his conflict with the gale by some sly strip of
+slipperiness, abounding in that conduit of the markets, which had more or
+less adroitly performed the trick upon preceding passengers, and now laid
+this one flat amid the shuffle of feet, peaceful for the moment as the
+uncomplaining who have gone to Sabrina beneath the tides.  He was unhurt,
+quite sound, merely astonished, he remarked, in reply to the inquiries of
+the first kind helper at his elbow; and it appeared an acceptable
+statement of his condition.  He laughed, shook his coat-tails, smoothed
+the back of his head rather thoughtfully, thankfully received his runaway
+hat, nodded bright beams to right and left, and making light of the muddy
+stigmas imprinted by the pavement, he scattered another shower of his
+nods and smiles around, to signify, that as his good friends would wish,
+he thoroughly felt his legs and could walk unaided.  And he was in the
+act of doing it, questioning his familiar behind the waistcoat amazedly,
+to tell him how such a misadventure could have occurred to him of all
+men, when a glance below his chin discomposed his outward face.  'Oh,
+confound the fellow!' he said, with simple frankness, and was humorously
+ruffled, having seen absurd blots of smutty knuckles distributed over the
+maiden waistcoat.
+
+His outcry was no more than the confidential communication of a genial
+spirit with that distinctive article of his attire.  At the same time,
+for these friendly people about him to share the fun of the annoyance,
+he looked hastily brightly back, seeming with the contraction of his
+brows to frown, on the little band of observant Samaritans; in the centre
+of whom a man who knew himself honourably unclean, perhaps consequently a
+bit of a political jewel, hearing one of their number confounded for his
+pains, and by the wearer of a superfine dashing-white waistcoat, was
+moved to take notice of the total deficiency of gratitude in this kind of
+gentleman's look and pocket.  If we ask for nothing for helping gentlemen
+to stand upright on their legs, and get it, we expect civility into the
+bargain.  Moreover, there are reasons in nature why we choose to give
+sign of a particular surliness when our wealthy superiors would have us
+think their condescending grins are cordials.
+
+The gentleman's eyes were followed on a second hurried downward grimace,
+the necessitated wrinkles of which could be stretched by malevolence to a
+semblance of haughty disgust; reminding us, through our readings in
+journals, of the wicked overblown Prince Regent and his Court, together
+with the view taken of honest labour in the mind of supercilious luxury,
+even if indebted to it freshly for a trifle; and the hoar-headed
+nineteenth-century billow of democratic ire craved the word to be set
+swelling.
+
+'Am I the fellow you mean, sir?' the man said.
+
+He was answered, not ungraciously: 'All right, my man.'
+
+But the balance of our public equanimity is prone to violent antic
+bobbings on occasions when, for example, an ostentatious garment shall
+appear disdainful our class and ourself, and coin of the realm has not
+usurped command of one of the scales: thus a fairly pleasant answer, cast
+in persuasive features, provoked the retort:
+
+'There you're wrong; nor wouldn't be.'
+
+'What's that?' was the gentleman's musical inquiry.
+
+'That's flat, as you was half a minute ago,' the man rejoined.
+
+'Ah, well, don't be impudent,' the gentleman said, by way of amiable
+remonstrance before a parting.
+
+'And none of your dam punctilio,' said the man.
+
+Their exchange rattled smartly, without a direct hostility, and the
+gentleman stepped forward.
+
+It was observed in the crowd, that after a few paces he put two fingers
+on the back of his head.
+
+They might suppose him to be condoling with his recent mishap.  But,
+in fact, a thing had occurred to vex him more than a descent upon the
+pavement or damage to his waistcoat's whiteness: he abominated the
+thought of an altercation with a member of the mob; he found that
+enormous beat comprehensible only when it applauded him; and besides
+he wished it warmly well; all that was good for it; plentiful dinners,
+country excursions, stout menagerie bars, music, a dance, and to bed:
+he was for patting, stroking, petting the mob, for tossing it sops,
+never for irritating it to show an eye-tooth, much less for causing it
+to exhibit the grinders: and in endeavouring to get at the grounds of his
+dissension with that dirty-fisted fellow, the recollection of the word
+punctilio shot a throb of pain to the spot where his mishap had rendered
+him susceptible.  Headache threatened--and to him of all men!  But was
+there ever such a word for drumming on a cranium?  Puzzles are presented
+to us now and then in the course of our days; and the smaller they are
+the better for the purpose, it would seem; and they come in rattle-boxes,
+they are actually children's toys, for what they contain, but not the
+less do they buzz at our understandings and insist that they break or we,
+and, in either case, to show a mere foolish idle rattle in hollowness.
+Or does this happen to us only after a fall?
+
+He tried a suspension of his mental efforts, and the word was like the
+clapper of a disorderly bell, striking through him, with reverberations,
+in the form of interrogations, as to how he, of all men living, could by
+any chance have got into a wrangle, in a thoroughfare, on London Bridge,
+of all places in the world!--he, so popular, renowned for his affability,
+his amiability; having no dislike to common dirty dogs, entirely the
+reverse, liking them and doing his best for them; and accustomed to
+receive their applause.  And in what way had he offered a hint to bring
+on him the charge of punctilio?
+
+'But I am treating it seriously!' he said, and jerked a dead laugh while
+fixing a button of his coat.
+
+That he should have treated it seriously, furnished next the subject of
+cogitation; and here it was plainly suggested, that a degradation of his
+physical system, owing to the shock of the fall, must be seen and
+acknowledged; for it had become a perverted engine, to pull him down
+among the puerilities, and very soon he was worrying at punctilio anew,
+attempting to read the riddle of the application of it to himself, angry
+that he had allowed it to be the final word, and admitting it a famous
+word for the closing of a controversy:--it banged the door and rolled
+drum-notes; it deafened reason.  And was it a London cockney crow-word of
+the day, or a word that had stuck in the fellow's head from the perusal
+of his pothouse newspaper columns?
+
+Furthermore, the plea of a fall, and the plea of a shock from a fall,
+required to account for the triviality of the mind, were humiliating to
+him who had never hitherto missed a step, or owned to the shortest of
+collapses.  This confession of deficiency in explosive repartee--using a
+friend's term for the ready gift--was an old and a rueful one with Victor
+Radnor.  His godmother Fortune denied him that.  She bestowed it on his
+friend Fenellan, and little else.  Simeon Fenellan could clap the halter
+on a coltish mob; he had positively caught the roar of cries and stilled
+it, by capping the cries in turn, until the people cheered him; and the
+effect of the scene upon Victor Radnor disposed him to rank the gift of
+repartee higher than a certain rosily oratorical that he was permitted to
+tell himself he possessed, in bottle if not on draught.  Let it only be
+explosive repartee: the well-fused bomb, the bubble to the stone, echo
+round the horn.  Fenellan, would have discharged an extinguisher on
+punctilio in emission.  Victor Radnor was unable to cope with it
+reflectively.
+
+No, but one doesn't like being beaten by anything!  he replied to an
+admonishment of his better mind, as he touched his two fingers, more
+significantly dubious than the whole hand, at the back of his head, and
+checked or stemmed the current of a fear.  For he was utterly unlike
+himself; he was dwelling on a trifle, on a matter discernibly the
+smallest, an incident of the streets; and although he refused to feel a
+bump or any responsive notification of a bruise, he made a sacrifice of
+his native pride to his intellectual, in granting that he must have been
+shaken, so childishly did he continue thinking.
+
+Yes, well, and if a tumble distorts our ideas of life, and an odd word
+engrosses our speculations, we are poor creatures, he addressed another
+friend, from whom he stood constitutionally in dissent naming him Colney;
+and under pressure of the name, reviving old wrangles between them upon
+man's present achievements and his probable destinies: especially upon
+England's grandeur, vitality, stability, her intelligent appreciation of
+her place in the universe; not to speak of the historic dignity of London
+City.  Colney had to be overcome afresh, and he fled, but managed, with
+two or three of his bitter phrases, to make a cuttle-fish fight of it,
+that oppressively shadowed his vanquisher:
+
+The Daniel Lambert of Cities: the Female Annuitant of Nations:--and such
+like, wretched stuff, proper to Colney Durance, easily dispersed and out-
+laughed when we have our vigour.  We have as much as we need of it in
+summoning a contemptuous Pooh to our lips, with a shrug at venomous
+dyspepsia.
+
+Nevertheless, a malignant sketch of Colney's, in the which Hengist and
+Horsa, our fishy Saxon originals, in modern garb of liveryman and
+gaitered squire, flat-headed, paunchy, assiduously servile, are shown
+blacking Ben-Israel's boots and grooming the princely stud of the Jew,
+had come so near to Victor Radnor's apprehensions of a possible, if not
+an impending, consummation, that the ghastly vision of the Jew Dominant
+in London City, over England, over Europe, America, the world (a picture
+drawn in literary sepia by Colney: with our poor hang neck population
+uncertain about making a bell-rope of the forelock to the Satyr-snouty
+master; and the Norman Lord de Warenne handing him for a lump sum son and
+daughter, both to be Hebraized in their different ways), fastened on the
+most mercurial of patriotic men, and gave him a whole-length plunge into
+despondency.
+
+It lasted nearly a minute.  His recovery was not in this instance due to
+the calling on himself for the rescue of an ancient and glorious country;
+nor altogether to the spectacle of the shipping, over the parapet, to his
+right: the hundreds of masts rising out of the merchant river; London's
+unrivalled mezzotint and the City' rhetorician's inexhaustible argument:
+he gained it rather from the imperious demand of an animated and thirsty
+frame for novel impressions.  Commonly he was too hot with his business,
+and airy fancies above it when crossing the bridge, to reflect in
+freshness on its wonders; though a phrase could spring him alive to them;
+a suggestion of the Foreigner, jealous, condemned to admire in despair of
+outstripping, like Satan worsted; or when a Premier's fine inflation
+magnified the scene at City banquets--exciting while audible, if a
+waggery in memory; or when England's cherished Bard, the Leading Article,
+blew bellows, and wind primed the lieges.
+
+That a phrase on any other subject was of much the same effect, in
+relation to it, may be owned; he was lightly kindled.  The scene,
+however, had a sharp sparkle of attractiveness at the instant.  Down went
+the twirling horizontal pillars of a strong tide from the arches of the
+bridge, breaking to wild water at a remove; and a reddish Northern cheek
+of curdling pipeing East, at shrilly puffs between the Tower and the
+Custom House, encountered it to whip and ridge the flood against
+descending tug and long tail of stern-ajerk empty barges; with a steamer
+slowly noseing round off the wharf-cranes, preparing to swirl the screw;
+and half-bottom-upward boats dancing harpooner beside their whale; along
+an avenue, not fabulously golden, of the deputy masts of all nations, a
+wintry woodland, every rag aloft curling to volume; and here the spouts
+and the mounds of steam, and rolls of brown smoke there, variously
+undulated, curved to vanish; cold blue sky ashift with the whirl and dash
+of a very Tartar cavalry of cloud overhead.
+
+Surely a scene pretending to sublimity?
+
+Gazeing along that grand highway of the voyageing forest, your London
+citizen of good estate has reproached his country's poets for not pouring
+out, succinctly and melodiously, his multitudinous larvae of notions
+begotten by the scene.  For there are times when he would, pay to have
+them sung; and he feels them big; he thinks them human in their bulk;
+they are Londinensian; they want but form and fire to get them scored on
+the tablets of the quotable at festive boards.  This he can promise to
+his poets.  As for otherwhere than at the festive, Commerce invoked is a
+Goddess that will have the reek of those boards to fill her nostrils, and
+poet and alderman alike may be dedicate to the sublime, she leads them,
+after two sniffs of an idea concerning her, for the dive into the turtle-
+tureen.  Heels up they go, poet first--a plummet he!
+
+And besides it is barely possible for our rounded citizen, in the mood of
+meditation, to direct his gaze off the bridge along the waterway North-
+eastward without beholding as an eye the glow of whitebait's bow-window
+by the riverside, to the front of the summer sunset, a league or so down
+stream; where he sees, in memory savours, the Elysian end of Commerce:
+frontispiece of a tale to fetch us up the out-wearied spectre of old
+Apicius; yea, and urge Crispinus to wheel his purse into the market for
+the purchase of a costlier mullet!
+
+But is the Jew of the usury gold becoming our despot-king of Commerce?
+
+In that case, we do not ask our country's poets to compose a single
+stanza of eulogy's rhymes--far from it.  Far to the contrary, we bid
+ourselves remember the sons of whom we are; instead of revelling in the
+fruits of Commerce, we shoot scornfully past those blazing bellied
+windows of the aromatic dinners, and beyond Thames, away to the
+fishermen's deeps, Old England's native element, where the strenuous
+ancestry of a race yet and ever manful at the stress of trial are heard
+around and aloft whistling us back to the splendid strain of muscle, and
+spray fringes cloud, and strong heart rides the briny scoops and
+hillocks, and Death and Man are at grip for the haul.
+
+There we find our nationality, our poetry, no Hebrew competing.
+
+We do: or there at least we left it.  Whether to recover it when wanted,
+is not so certain.  Humpy Hengist and dumpy Horsa, quitting ledger and
+coronet, might recur to their sea bowlegs and red-stubble chins, might
+take to their tarpaulins again; they might renew their manhood on the
+capture of cod; headed by Harald and Hardiknut, they might roll surges to
+whelm a Dominant Jew clean gone to the fleshpots and effeminacy.
+Aldermen of our ancient conception, they may teach him that he has been
+backsliding once more, and must repent in ashes, as those who are for
+jewels, titles, essences, banquets, for wallowing in slimy spawn of
+lucre, have ever to do.  They dispossess him of his greedy gettings.
+
+And how of the Law?
+
+But the Law is always, and must ever be, the Law of the stronger.
+
+--Ay, but brain beats muscle, and what if the Jew should prove to have
+superior power of brain?  A dreaded hypothesis!  Why, then you see the
+insurgent Saxon seamen (of the names in two syllables with accent on the
+first), and their Danish captains, and it may be but a remnant of high-
+nosed old Norman Lord de Warenne beside them, in the criminal box: and
+presently the Jew smoking a giant regalia cigar on a balcony giving view
+of a gallows-tree.  But we will try that: on our side, to back a native
+pugnacity, is morality, humanity, fraternity--nature's rights, aha! and
+who withstands them? on his, a troop of mercenaries!
+
+And that lands me in Red Republicanism, a hop and a skip from Socialism!
+said Mr. Radnor, and chuckled ironically at the natural declivity he had
+come to.  Still, there was an idea in it .  .  .  .
+
+A short run or attempt at running after the idea, ended in pain to his
+head near the spot where the haunting word punctilio caught at any excuse
+for clamouring.
+
+Yet we cannot relinquish an idea that was ours; we are vowed to the
+pursuit of it.  Mr. Radnor lighted on the tracks, by dint of a thought
+flung at his partner Mr. Inchling's dread of the Jews.  Inchling dreaded
+Scotchmen as well, and Americans, and Armenians, and Greeks: latterly
+Germans hardly less; but his dread of absorption in Jewry, signifying
+subjection, had often precipitated a deplorable shrug, in which Victor
+Radnor now perceived the skirts of his idea, even to a fancy that
+something of the idea must have struck Inchling when he shrugged: the
+idea being .  .  .  he had lost it again.  Definition seemed to be an
+extirpation enemy of this idea, or she was by nature shy.  She was very
+feminine; coming when she willed and flying when wanted.  Not until nigh
+upon the close of his history did she return, full-statured and
+embraceable, to Victor Radnor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THROUGH THE VAGUE TO THE INFINITELY LITTLE
+
+The fair dealing with readers demands of us, that a narrative shall not
+proceed at slower pace than legs of a man in motion; and we are still but
+little more than midway across London Bridge.  But if a man's mind is to
+be taken as a part of him, the likening of it, at an introduction, to an
+army on the opening march of a great campaign, should plead excuses for
+tardy forward movements, in consideration of the large amount of matter
+you have to review before you can at all imagine yourselves to have made
+his acquaintance.  This it is not necessary to do when you are set
+astride the enchanted horse of the Tale, which leaves the man's mind at
+home while he performs the deeds befitting him: he can indeed be rapid.
+Whether more active, is a question asking for your notions of the
+governing element in the composition of man, and of hid present business
+here.  The Tale inspirits one's earlier ardours, when we sped without
+baggage, when the Impossible was wings to imagination, and heroic
+sculpture the simplest act of the chisel.  It does not advance, 'tis
+true; it drives the whirligig circle round and round the single existing
+central point; but it is enriched with applause of the boys and girls of
+both ages in this land; and all the English critics heap their honours on
+its brave old Simplicity: our national literary flag, which signalizes us
+while we float, subsequently to flap above the shallows.  One may sigh
+for it.  An ill-fortuned minstrel who has by fateful direction been
+brought to see with distinctness, that man is not as much comprised in
+external features as the monkey, will be devoted to the task of the
+fuller portraiture.
+
+After his ineffectual catching at the volatile idea, Mr. Radnor found
+repose in thoughts of his daughter and her dear mother.  They had begged
+him to put on an overcoat this day of bitter wind, or a silken kerchief
+for the throat.  Faithful to the Spring, it had been his habit since
+boyhood to show upon his person something of the hue of the vernal month,
+the white of the daisied meadow, and although he owned a light overcoat
+to dangle from shoulders at the Opera crush, he declined to wear it for
+protection.  His gesture of shaking and expanding whenever the tender
+request was urged on him, signified a physical opposition to the control
+of garments.  Mechanically now, while doating in fancy over the couple
+beseeching him, he loosened the button across his defaced waistcoat,
+exposed a large measure of chest to flaws of a wind barbed on Norwegian
+peaks by the brewers of cough and catarrh--horrid women of the whistling
+clouts, in the pay of our doctors.  He braved them; he starved the
+profession.  He was that man in fifty thousand who despises hostile
+elements and goes unpunished, calmly erect among a sneezing and tumbled
+host, as a lighthouse overhead of breezy fleets.  The coursing of his
+blood was by comparison electrical; he had not the sensation of cold,
+other than that of an effort of the elements to arouse him; and so quick
+was he, through this fine animation, to feel, think, act, that the three
+successive tributaries of conduct appeared as an irreflective flash and a
+gamester's daring in the vein to men who had no deep knowledge of him and
+his lightning arithmetic for measuring, sounding, and deciding.
+
+Naturally he was among the happiest of human creatures; he willed it so,
+with consent of circumstances; a boisterous consent, as when votes are
+reckoned for a favourite candidate: excepting on the part of a small band
+of black dissentients in a corner, a minute opaque body, devilish in
+their irreconcilability, who maintain their struggle to provoke discord,
+with a cry disclosing the one error of his youth, the sole bad step
+chargeable upon his antecedents.  But do we listen to them?  Shall we not
+have them turned out?  He gives the sign for it; and he leaves his
+buoying constituents to outroar them: and he tells a friend that it was
+not, as one may say, an error, although an erratic step: but let us
+explain to our bosom friend; it was a step quite unregretted, gloried in;
+a step deliberately marked, to be done again, were the time renewed: it
+was a step necessitated (emphatically) by a false preceding step; and
+having youth to plead for it, in the first instance, youth and ignorance;
+and secondly, and O how deeply truly!  Love.  Deep true love, proved by
+years, is the advocate.
+
+He tells himself at the same time, after lending ear to the advocate's
+exordium and a favourite sentence, that, judged by the Powers (to them
+only can he expose the whole skeleton-cupboard of the case), judged by
+those clear-sighted Powers, he is exonerated.
+
+To be exonerated by those awful Powers, is to be approved.
+
+As to that, there is no doubt: whom they, all-seeing, discerning as they
+do, acquit they justify.
+
+Whom they justify, they compliment.
+
+They, seeing all the facts, are not unintelligent of distinctions, as the
+world is.
+
+What, to them, is the spot of the error?--admitting it as an error.
+They know it for a thing of convention, not of Nature.  We stand forth
+to plead it in proof of an adherence to Nature's laws: we affirm, that
+far from a defilement, it is an illumination and stamp of nobility.  On
+the beloved who shares it with us, it is a stamp of the highest nobility.
+Our world has many ways for signifying its displeasure, but it cannot
+brand an angel.
+
+This was another favourite sentence of Love's grand oration for the
+defence.  So seductive was it to the Powers who sat in judgement on the
+case, that they all, when the sentence came, turned eyes upon the angel,
+and they smiled.
+
+They do not smile on the condemnable.
+
+She, then, were he rebuked, would have strength to uplift him.  And who,
+calling her his own, could be placed in second rank among the blissful!
+
+Mr. Radnor could rationally say that he was made for happiness; he flew
+to it, he breathed, dispensed it.  How conceive the clear-sighted
+celestial Powers as opposing his claim to that estate?  Not they.  He
+knew, for he had them safe in the locked chamber of his breast, to yield
+him subservient responses.  The world, or Puritanic members of it, had
+pushed him to the trial once or twice--or had put on an air of doing so;
+creating a temporary disturbance, ending in a merry duet with his
+daughter Nesta Victoria: a glorious trio when her mother Natalia, sweet
+lily that she was, shook the rainwater from her cup and followed the good
+example to shine in the sun.
+
+He had a secret for them.
+
+Nesta's promising soprano, and her mother's contralto, and his baritone
+--a true baritone, not so well trained as their accurate notes--should
+be rising in spirited union with the curtain of that secret: there was
+matter for song and concert, triumph and gratulation in it.  And during
+the whole passage of the bridge, he had not once cast thought on a secret
+so palpitating, the cause of the morning's expedition and a long year's
+prospect of the present day!  It seemed to have been knocked clean out of
+it--punctilioed out, Fenellan might say.  Nor had any combinations upon
+the theme of business displaced it.  Just before the fall, the whole
+drama of the unfolding of that secret was brilliant to his eyes as a
+scene on a stage.
+
+He refused to feel any sensible bruise on his head, with the admission
+that he perhaps might think he felt one which was virtually no more than
+the feeling of a thought;--what his friend Dr. Peter Yatt would define as
+feeling a rotifer astir in the curative compartment of a homoeopathic
+globule: and a playful fancy may do that or anything.  Only, Sanity does
+not allow the infinitely little to disturb us.
+
+Mr. Radnor had a quaint experience of the effects of the infinitely
+little while threading his way to a haberdasher's shop for new white
+waistcoats.  Under the shadow of the representative statue of City
+Corporations and London's majesty, the figure of Royalty, worshipful in
+its marbled redundancy, fronting the bridge, on the slope where the seas
+of fish and fruit below throw up a thin line of their drift, he stood
+contemplating the not unamiable, reposefully-jolly, Guelphic countenance,
+from the loose jowl to the bent knee, as if it were a novelty to him;
+unwilling to trust himself to the roadway he had often traversed, equally
+careful that his hesitation should not be seen.  A trifle more
+impressible, he might have imagined the smoky figure and magnum of
+pursiness barring the City against him.  He could have laughed aloud at
+the hypocrisy behind his quiet look of provincial wonderment at London's
+sculptor's art; and he was partly tickled as well by the singular fit of
+timidity enchaining him.  Cart, omnibus, cab, van, barrow, donkey-tray,
+went by in strings, broken here and there, and he could not induce his
+legs to take advantage of the gaps; he listened to a warning that he
+would be down again if he tried it, among those wheels; and his nerves
+clutched him, like a troop of household women, to keep him from the
+hazard of an exposure to the horrid crunch, pitiless as tiger's teeth;
+and we may say truly, that once down, or once out of the rutted line, you
+are food for lion and jackal--the forces of the world will have you in
+their mandibles.
+
+An idea was there too; but it would not accept pursuit.
+
+'A pretty scud overheard?' said a voice at his ear.
+
+'For fine!--to-day at least,' Mr. Radnor affably replied to a stranger;
+and gazing on the face of his friend Fenellan, knew the voice, and
+laughed: 'You?' He straightened his back immediately to cross the road,
+dismissing nervousness as a vapour, asking, between a cab and a van:
+'Anything doing in the City?' For Mr. Fenellan's proper station faced
+Westward.
+
+The reply was deferred until they had reached the pavement, when Mr.
+Fenellan said: 'I'll tell you,' and looked a dubious preface, to his
+friend's thinking.
+
+But it was merely the mental inquiry following a glance at mud-spots on
+the coat.
+
+'We'll lunch; lunch with me, I must eat, tell me then,' said Mr. Radnor,
+adding within himself: 'Emptiness! want of food!' to account for recent
+ejaculations and qualms.  He had not eaten for a good four hours.
+
+Fenellan's tone signified to his feverish sensibility of the moment,
+that the matter was personal; and the intimation of a touch on domestic
+affairs caused sinkings in his vacuity, much as though his heart were
+having a fall.
+
+He mentioned the slip on the bridge, to explain his: need to visit a
+haberdasher's shop, and pointed at the waistcoat.
+
+Mr. Fenellan was compassionate over the 'Poor virgin of the smoky city!'
+
+'They have their ready-made at these shops--last year's: perhaps, never
+mind, do for the day,' said Mr. Radnor, impatient for eating, now that he
+had spoken of it.  'A basin of turtle; I can't wait.  A brush of the
+coat; mud must be dry by this time.  Clear turtle, I think, with a bottle
+of the Old Veuve.  Not bad news to tell?  You like that Old Veuve?'
+
+'Too well to tell bad news of her,' said Mr. Fenellan in a manner to
+reassure his friend, as he intended.  'You wouldn't credit it for the
+Spring of the year, without the spotless waistcoat?'
+
+'Something of that, I suppose.'  And so saying, Mr. Radnor entered the
+shop of his quest, to be complimented by the shopkeeper, while the
+attendants climbed the ladder to upper stages for white-waistcoat boxes,
+on his being; the first bird of the season; which it pleased him to hear;
+for the smallest of our gratifications in life could give a happy tone to
+this brightly-constituted gentleman.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+OLD VEUVE
+
+They were known at the house of the turtle and the attractive Old Veuve:
+a champagne of a sobered sweetness, of a great year, a great age,
+counting up to the extremer maturity attained by wines of stilly depths;
+and their worthy comrade, despite the wanton sparkles, for the promoting
+of the state of reverential wonderment in rapture, which an ancient wine
+will lead to, well you wot.  The silly girly sugary crudity his given way
+to womanly suavity, matronly composure, with yet the sparkles; they
+ascend; but hue and flavour tell of a soul that has come to a lodgement
+there.  It conducts the youthful man to temples of dusky thought:
+philosophers partaking of it are drawn by the arms of garlanded nymphs
+about their necks into the fathomless of inquiries.  It presents us with
+a sphere, for the pursuit of the thing we covet most.  It bubbles over
+mellowness; it has, in the marriage with Time, extracted a spice of
+individuality from the saccharine: by miracle, one would say, were it
+not for our knowledge of the right noble issue of Time when he and good
+things unite.  There should be somewhere legends of him and the wine-
+flask.  There must be meanings to that effect in the Mythology, awaiting
+unravelment.  For the subject opens to deeper than cellars, and is a tree
+with vast ramifications of the roots and the spreading growth, whereon
+half if not all the mythic Gods, Inferior and Superior, Infernal and
+Celestial, might be shown sitting in concord, performing in concert,
+harmoniously receiving sacrificial offerings of the black or the white;
+and the black not extinguishing the fairer fellow.  Tell us of a
+certainty that Time has embraced the wine-flask, then may it be asserted
+(assuming the great year for the wine, i.e.  combinations above) that a
+speck of the white within us who drink will conquer, to rise in main
+ascension over volumes of the black.  It may, at a greater venture, but
+confidently, be said in plain speech, that the Bacchus of auspicious
+birth induces ever to the worship of the loftier Deities.
+
+Think as you will; forbear to come hauling up examples of malarious men,
+in whom these pourings of the golden rays of life breed fogs; and be
+moved, since you are scarcely under an obligation to hunt the meaning,
+in tolerance of some dithyrambic inebriety of narration (quiverings of
+the reverent pen) when we find ourselves entering the circle of a most
+magnetic polarity.  Take it for not worse than accompanying choric
+flourishes, in accord with Mr. Victor Radnor and Mr. Simeon Fenellan at
+their sipping of the venerable wine.
+
+Seated in a cosy corner, near the grey City window edged with a sooty
+maze, they praised the wine, in the neuter and in the feminine; that for
+the glass, this for the widow-branded bottle: not as poets hymning; it
+was done in the City manner, briefly, part pensively, like men travelling
+to the utmost bourne of flying flavour (a dell in infinite nether), and
+still masters of themselves and at home.
+
+Such a wine, in its capturing permeation of us, insists on being for a
+time a theme.
+
+'I wonder!' said Mr. Radnor, completely restored, eyeing his half-emptied
+second glass and his boon-fellow.
+
+'Low!' Mr. Fenellan shook his head.
+
+'Half a dozen dozen left?'
+
+'Nearer the half of that.  And who's the culprit?'
+
+'Old days!  They won't let me have another dozen out of the house now.'
+
+'They'll never hit on such another discovery in their cellar, unless they
+unearth a fifth corner.'
+
+'I don't blame them for making the price prohibitive.  And sound as
+ever!'
+
+Mr. Radnor watched the deliberate constant ascent of bubbles through
+their rose-topaz transparency.  He drank.  That notion of the dish of
+turtle was an inspiration of the right: he ought always to know it for
+the want of replenishment when such a man as he went quaking.  His latest
+experiences of himself were incredible; but they passed, as the dimples
+of the stream.  He finished his third glass.  The bottle, like the
+cellar-wine, was at ebb: unlike the cellar-wine, it could be set flowing
+again: He prattled, in the happy ignorance of compulsion:
+
+'Fenellan, remember, I had a sort of right to the wine--to the best I
+could get; and this Old Veuve, more than any other, is a bridal wine!
+We heard of Giulia Sanfredini's marriage to come off with the Spanish
+Duke, and drank it to the toast of our little Nesta's godmother.  I 've
+told you.  We took the girl to the Opera, when quite a little one--that
+high:--and I declare to you, it was marvellous!  Next morning after
+breakfast, she plants herself in the middle of the room, and strikes her
+attitude for song, and positively, almost with the Sanfredini's voice--
+illusion of it, you know,--trills us out more than I could have believed
+credible to be recollected by a child.  But I've told you the story.  We
+called her Fredi from that day.  I sent the diva, with excuses and
+compliments, a nuptial present-necklace, Roman goldwork, locket-pendant,
+containing sunny curl, and below a fine pearl; really pretty; telling her
+our grounds for the liberty.  She replied, accepting the responsible
+office; touching letter--we found it so; framed in Fredi's room, under
+her godmother's photograph.  Fredi has another heroine now, though she
+worships her old one still; she never abandons her old ones.  You've
+heard the story over and over!'
+
+Mr. Fenellan nodded; he had a tenderness for the garrulity of Old Veuve,
+and for the damsel.  Chatter on that subject ran pleasantly with their
+entertainment.
+
+Mr. Radnor meanwhile scribbled, and despatched a strip of his Note-book,
+bearing a scrawl of orders, to his office.  He was now fully himself,
+benevolent, combative, gay, alert for amusement or the probeing of
+schemes to the quick, weighing the good and the bad in them with his
+fine touch on proportion.
+
+'City dead flat?  A monotonous key; but it's about the same as fetching a
+breath after a run; only, true, it lasts too long--not healthy!  Skepsey
+will bring me my letters.  I was down in the country early this morning,
+looking over the house, with Taplow, my architect; and he speaks fairly
+well of the contractors.  Yes, down at Lakelands; and saw my first lemon
+butterfly in a dell of sunshine, out of the wind, and had half a mind to
+catch it for Fredi,--and should have caught it myself, if I had!  The
+truth is, we three are country born and bred; we pine in London.  Good
+for a season; you know my old feeling.  They are to learn the secret of
+Lakelands to-morrow.  It 's great fun; they think I don't see they've had
+their suspicion for some time.  You said--somebody said--"the eye of a
+needle for what they let slip of their secrets, and the point of it for
+penetrating yours":--women.  But no; my dear souls didn't prick and
+bother.  And they dealt with a man in armour.  I carry them down to
+Lakelands to-morrow, if the City's flat.'
+
+'Keeping a secret's the lid on a boiling pot with you,' Mr. Fenellan
+said; and he mused on the profoundness of the flavour at his lips.
+
+'I do it.'
+
+'You do: up to bursting at the breast.'
+
+'I keep it from Colney!'
+
+'As Vesuvius keeps it from Palmieri when shaking him.'
+
+'Has old Colney an idea of it?'
+
+'He has been foretelling an eruption of an edifice.'
+
+The laugh between them subsided to pensiveness.
+
+Mr. Fenellan's delay in the delivery of his news was eloquent to reveal
+the one hateful topic; and this being seen, it waxed to such increase of
+size with the passing seconds, that prudence called for it.
+
+'Come!' said Mr. Radnor.
+
+The appeal was understood.
+
+'Nothing very particular.  I came into the City to look at a warehouse
+they want to mount double guard on.  Your idea of the fireman's night-
+patrol and wires has done wonders for the office.'
+
+'I guarantee the City if all my directions are followed.'
+
+Mr. Fenellan's remark, that he had nothing very particular to tell,
+reduced it to the mere touch upon a vexatious matter, which one has to
+endure in the ears at times; but it may be postponed.  So Mr. Radnor
+encouraged him to talk of an Insurance Office Investment.  Where it is
+all bog and mist, as in the City to-day, the maxim is, not to take a
+step, they agreed.  Whether it was attributable to an unconsumed glut of
+the markets, or apprehension of a panic, had to be considered.  Both
+gentlemen were angry with the Birds on the flags of foreign nations,
+which would not imitate a sawdust Lion to couch reposefully.  Incessantly
+they scream and sharpen talons.
+
+'They crack the City bubbles and bladders, at all events,' Mr. Fenellan
+said.  'But if we let our journals go on making use of them, in the shape
+of sham hawks overhead, we shall pay for their one good day of the game
+with our loss of the covey.  An unstable London's no world's market-
+place.'
+
+'No, no; it's a niggardly national purse, not the journals,' Mr. Radnor
+said.  'The journals are trading engines.  Panics are grist to them; so
+are wars; but they do their duty in warning the taxpayer and rousing
+Parliament.  Dr. Schlesien's right: we go on believing that our God
+Neptune will do everything for us, and won't see that Steam has paralyzed
+his Trident: good!  You and Colney are hard on Schlesien--or at him, I
+should say.  He's right: if we won't learn that we have become
+Continentals, we shall be marched over.  Laziness, cowardice, he says.'
+
+'Oh, be hanged!' interrupted Fenellan.  'As much of the former as you
+like.  He 's right about our "individualismus" being another name for
+selfishness, and showing the usual deficiency in external features; it's
+an individualism of all of a pattern, as when a mob cuts its lucky, each
+fellow his own way.  Well, then, conscript them, and they'll be all of a
+better pattern.  The only thing to do, and the cheapest.  By heaven!
+it's the only honourable thing to do.'
+
+Mr. Radnor disapproved.  'No conscription here.'
+
+'Not till you've got the drop of poison in your blood, in the form of an
+army landed.  That will teach you to catch at the drug.'
+
+'No, Fenellan!  Besides they've got to land.  I guarantee a trusty army
+and navy under a contract, at two-thirds of the present cost.  We'll
+start a National Defence Insurance Company after the next panic.'
+
+'During,' said Mr. Fenellan, and there was a flutter of laughter at the
+unobtrusive hint for seizing Dame England in the mood.
+
+Both dropped a sigh.
+
+'But you must try and run down with us to Lakelands to-morrow,' Mr.
+Radnor resumed on a cheerfuller theme.  'You have not yet seen all I 've
+done there.  And it 's a castle with a drawbridge: no exchangeing of
+visits, as we did at Craye Farm and at Creckholt; we are there for
+country air; we don't court neighbours at all--perhaps the elect; it will
+depend on Nataly's wishes.  We can accommodate our Concert-set, and about
+thirty or forty more, for as long as they like.  You see, that was my
+intention--to be independent of neighbouring society.  Madame Callet
+guarantees dinners or hot suppers for eighty--and Armandine is the last
+person to be recklessly boasting.--When was it I was thinking last of
+Armandine?' He asked himself that, as he rubbed at the back of his head.
+
+Mr. Fenellan was reading his friend's character by the light of his
+remarks and in opposition to them, after the critical fashion of
+intimates who know as well as hear: but it was amiably and trippingly,
+on the dance of the wine in his veins.
+
+His look, however, was one that reminded; and Mr. Radnor cried: 'Now!
+whatever it is!'
+
+'I had an interview: I assure you,' Mr. Fenellan interposed to pacify:
+'the smallest of trifles, and to be expected: I thought you ought to know
+it:--an interview with her lawyer; office business, increase of Insurance
+on one of her City warehouses.'
+
+'Speak her name, speak the woman's name; we're talking like a pair of
+conspirators,' exclaimed Mr. Radnor.
+
+'He informed me that Mrs. Burman has heard of the new mansion.'
+
+'My place at Lakelands?'
+
+Mr. Radnor's clear-water eyes hardened to stony as their vision ran along
+the consequences of her having heard it.
+
+'Earlier this time!' he added, thrummed on the table, and thumped with
+knuckles.  'I make my stand at Lakelands for good!  Nothing mortal moves
+me!'
+
+'That butler of hers--'
+
+'Jarniman, you mean: he's her butler, yes, the scoundrel--h'm-pah!
+Heaven forgive me! she's an honest woman at least; I wouldn't rob her of
+her little: fifty-nine or sixty next September, fifteenth of the month!
+with the constitution of a broken drug-bottle, poor soul!  She hears
+everything from Jarniman: he catches wind of everything.  All foreseen,
+Fenellan, foreseen.  I have made my stand at Lakelands, and there's my
+flag till it's hauled down over Victor Radnor.  London kills Nataly as
+well as Fredi--and me: that is--I can use the words to you--I get back to
+primal innocence in the country.  We all three have the feeling.  You're
+a man to understand.  My beasts, and the wild flowers, hedge-banks, and
+stars.  Fredi's poetess will tell you.  Quiet waters reflecting.  I
+should feel it in Paris as well, though they have nightingales in their
+Bois.  It's the rustic I want to bathe me; and I had the feeling at
+school, biting at Horace.  Well, this is my Sabine Farm, rather on a
+larger scale, for the sake of friends.  Come, and pure air, water from
+the springs, walks and rides in lanes, high sand-lanes; Nataly loves
+them; Fredi worships the old roots of trees: she calls them the faces of
+those weedy sandy lanes.  And the two dear souls on their own estate,
+Fenellan!  And their poultry, cows, cream.  And a certain influence one
+has in the country socially.  I make my stand on a home--not empty
+punctilio.'
+
+Mr. Fenellan repeated, in a pause, 'Punctilio,' and not emphatically.
+
+'Don't bawl the word,' said Mr. Radnor, at the drum of whose ears it rang
+and sang.  'Here in the City the woman's harmless; and here,' he struck
+his breast.  'But she can shoot and hit another through me.  Ah, the
+witch!--poor wretch!  poor soul!  Only, she's malignant.  I could swear!
+But Colney 's right for once in something he says about oaths--"dropping
+empty buckets," or something.'
+
+'"Empty buckets to haul up impotent demons, whom we have to pay as
+heavily as the ready devil himself,"' Mr. Fenellan supplied the phrase.
+'Only, the moment old Colney moralizes, he's what the critics call
+sententious.  We've all a parlous lot too much pulpit in us.'
+
+'Come, Fenellan, I don't think .  .  .'
+
+'Oh, yes, but it's true of me too.'
+
+'You reserve it for your enemies.'
+
+'I 'd like to distract it a bit from the biggest of 'em.'  He pointed
+finger at the region of the heart.
+
+'Here we have Skepsey,' said Mr. Radnor, observing the rapid approach of
+a lean small figure, that in about the time of a straight-aimed javelin's
+cast, shot from the doorway to the table.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE SECOND BOTTLE
+
+This little dart of a man came to a stop at a respectful distance from
+his master, having the look of an arrested needle in mechanism.  His lean
+slip of face was an illumination of vivacious grey from the quickest of
+prominent large eyes.  He placed his master's letters legibly on the
+table, and fell to his posture of attention, alert on stiff legs, the
+hands like sucking-cubs at play with one another.
+
+Skepsey waited for Mr. Fenellan to notice him.
+
+'How about the Schools for Boxing?' that gentleman said.
+
+Deploring in motion the announcement he had to make, Skepsey replied: 'I
+have a difficulty in getting the plan treated seriously: a person of no
+station:--it does not appear of national importance.  Ladies are against.
+They decline their signatures; and ladies have great influence; because
+of the blood; which we know is very slight, rather healthy than not; and
+it could be proved for the advantage of the frailer sex.  They seem to be
+unaware of their own interests--ladies.  The contention all around us is
+with ignorance.  My plan is written; I have shown it, and signatures of
+gentlemen, to many of our City notables favourable in most cases:
+gentlemen of the Stock Exchange highly.  The clergy and the medical
+profession are quite with me.'
+
+'The surgical, perhaps you mean?'
+
+'Also, sir.  The clergy strongly.'
+
+'On the grounds of--what, Skepsey?'
+
+'Morality.  I have fully explained to them:--after his work at the desk
+all day, the young City clerk wants refreshment.  He needs it, must have
+it.  I propose to catch him on his way to his music-halls and other
+places, and take him to one of our establishments.  A short term of
+instruction, and he would find a pleasure in the gloves; it would delight
+him more than excesses-beer and tobacco.  The female in her right place,
+certainly.'  Skepsey supplicated honest interpretation of his hearer, and
+pursued
+
+'It would improve his physical strength, at the same time add to his
+sense of personal dignity.'
+
+'Would you teach females as well--to divert them from their frivolities?'
+
+'That would have to be thought over, sir.  It would be better for them
+than using their nails.'
+
+'I don't know, Skepsey: I'm rather a Conservative there.'
+
+'Yes; with regard to the female, sir: I confess, my scheme does not
+include them.  They dance; that is a healthy exercise.  One has only to
+say, that it does not add to the national force, in case of emergency.
+I look to that.  And I am particular in proposing an exercise independent
+of--I have to say--sex.  Not that there is harm in sex.  But we are for
+training.  I hope my meaning is clear?'
+
+'Quite.  You would have boxing with the gloves to be a kind of monastic
+recreation.'
+
+'Recreation is the word, sir; I have often admired it,' said Skepsey,
+blinking, unsure of the signification of monastic.
+
+'I was a bit of a boxer once,' Mr. Fenellan said, conscious of height and
+breadth in measuring the wisp of a figure before him.
+
+'Something might be done with you still, sir.'
+
+Skepsey paid him the encomium after a respectful summary of his gifts in
+a glimpse.  Mr. Fenellan bowed to him.
+
+Mr. Radnor raised head from the notes he was pencilling upon letters
+perused.
+
+'Skepsey's craze: regeneration of the English race by boxing--nucleus of
+a national army?'
+
+'To face an enemy at close quarters--it teaches that, sir.  I have always
+been of opinion, that courage may be taught.  I do not say heroism.  And
+setting aside for a moment thoughts of an army, we create more valuable
+citizens.  Protection to the weak in streets and by-places--shocking
+examples of ruffians maltreating women, in view of a crowd.'
+
+'One strong man is an overmatch for your mob,' said Mr. Fenellan.
+
+Skepsey toned his assent to the diminishing thinness where a suspicion of
+the negative begins to wind upon a distant horn.
+
+'Knowing his own intentions; and before an ignorant mob:--strong, you
+say, sir?  I venture my word that a, decent lad, with science, would beat
+him.  It is a question of the study and practice of first principles.'
+
+'If you were to see a rascal giant mishandling a woman?' Skepsey conjured
+the scene by bending his head and peering abstractedly, as if over
+spectacles.
+
+'I would beg him to abstain, for his own sake.'
+
+Mr. Fenellan knew that the little fellow was not boasting.
+
+'My brother Dartrey had a lesson or two from you in the first principles,
+I think?'
+
+'Captain Dartrey is an athlete, sir: exceedingly quick and clever; a hard
+boxer to beat.'
+
+'You will not call him captain when you see him; he has dismissed the
+army.'
+
+'I much regret it, sir, much, that we have lost him.  Captain Dartrey
+Fenellan was a beautiful fencer.  He gave me some instruction; unhappily,
+I have to acknowledge, too late.  It is a beautiful art.  Captain Dartrey
+says, the French excel at it.  But it asks for a weapon, which nature has
+not given: whereas the fists .  .  .'
+
+'So,' Mr. Radnor handed notes and papers to Skepsey: 'No sign of life?'
+
+'It is not yet seen in the City, sir.'
+
+'The first principles of commercial activity have retreated to earth's
+maziest penetralia, where no tides are! is it not so, Skepsey?' said Mr.
+Fenellan, whose initiative and exuberance in loquency had been restrained
+by a slight oppression, known to guests; especially to the guest in the
+earlier process of his magnification and illumination by virtue of a
+grand old wine; and also when the news he has to communicate may be a
+stir to unpleasant heaps.  The shining lips and eyes of his florid face
+now proclaimed speech, with his Puckish fancy jack-o'-lanterning over it.
+'Business hangs to swing at every City door, like a ragshop Doll, on the
+gallows of overproduction.  Stocks and Shares are hollow nuts not a
+squirrel of the lot would stop to crack for sight of the milky kernel
+mouldered to beard.
+
+Percentage, like a cabman without a fare, has gone to sleep inside his
+vehicle.  Dividend may just be seen by tiptoe: stockholders, twinkling
+heels over the far horizon.  Too true!--and our merchants, brokers,
+bankers, projectors of Companies, parade our City to remind us of the
+poor steamed fellows trooping out of the burst-boiler-room of the big
+ship Leviathan, in old years; a shade or two paler than the crowd o' the
+passengers, apparently alive and conversible, but corpses, all of them to
+lie their length in fifteen minutes.'
+
+'And you, Fenellan?' cried his host, inspired for a second bottle by the
+lovely nonsense of a voluble friend wound up to the mark.
+
+'Doctor of the ship!  with this prescription!' Mr. Fenellan held up his
+glass.
+
+'Empty?'
+
+Mr. Fenellan made it completely so.  'Confident!' he affirmed.
+
+An order was tossed to the waiter, and both gentlemen screwed their lips
+in relish of his heavy consent to score off another bottle from the
+narrow list.
+
+'At the office in forty minutes,' Skepsey's master nodded to him and shot
+him forth, calling him back: 'By the way, in case a man named Jarniman
+should ask to see me, you turn him to the rightabout.'
+
+Skepsey repeated: 'Jarniman !' and flew.
+
+'A good servant,' Mr. Radnor said.  'Few of us think of our country so
+much, whatever may be said of the specific he offers.  Colney has
+impressed him somehow immensely: he studies to write too; pushes to
+improve himself; altogether a worthy creature.'
+
+The second bottle appeared.  The waiter, in sincerity a reluctant
+executioner, heightened his part for the edification of the admiring
+couple.
+
+'Take heart, Benjamin,' said Mr. Fenellan; 'it's only the bottle dies;
+and we are the angels above to receive the spirit.'
+
+'I'm thinking of the house,' Benjamin replied.  He told them that again.
+
+'It 's the loss of the fame of having the wine, that he mourns.  But,
+Benjamin,' said Mr. Fenellan, 'the fame enters into the partakers of it,
+and we spread it, and perpetuate it for you.'
+
+'That don't keep a house upright,' returned Benjamin.
+
+Mr. Fenellan murmured to himself: 'True enough, it 's elegy--though we
+perform it through a trumpet; and there's not a doubt of our being down
+or having knocked the world down, if we're loudly praised.'
+
+Benjamin waited to hear approval sounded on the lips uncertain as a woman
+is a wine of ticklish age.  The gentlemen nodded, and he retired.
+
+A second bottle, just as good as the first, should, one thoughtlessly
+supposes, procure us a similar reposeful and excursive enjoyment, as of
+men lying on their backs and flying imagination like a kite.  The effect
+was quite other.  Mr. Radnor drank hastily and spoke with heat: 'You told
+me All? tell me that!'
+
+Mr. Fenellan gathered himself together; he sipped, and relaxed his
+bracing.  But there really was a bit more to tell: not much, was it?  Not
+likely to puff a gale on the voluptuous indolence of a man drawn along by
+Nereids over sunny sea-waves to behold the birth of the Foam-Goddess?
+'According to Carling, her lawyer; that is, he hints she meditates a
+blow.'
+
+'Mrs. Burman means to strike a blow?'
+
+'The lady.'
+
+'Does he think I fear any--does he mean a blow with a weapon?  Is it a
+legal .  .  . ?  At last?  Fenellan!'
+
+'So I fancied I understood.'
+
+'But can the good woman dream of that as a blow to strike and hurt, for a
+punishment?--that's her one aim.'
+
+'She may have her hallucinations.'
+
+'But a blow--what a word for it!  But it's life to us life!  It's the
+blow we've prayed for.  Why, you know it!  Let her strike, we bless her.
+We've never had an ill feeling to the woman; utterly the contrary--pity,
+pity, pity!  Let her do that, we're at her feet, my Nataly and I.  If you
+knew what my poor girl suffers!  She 's a saint at the stake.  Chiefly on
+behalf of her family.  Fenellan, you may have a sort of guess at my
+fortune: I'll own to luck; I put in a claim to courage and calculation.'
+
+'You've been a bulwark to your friends.'
+
+'All, Fenellan, all-stocks, shares, mines, companies, industries at home
+and--abroad--all, at a sweep, to have the woman strike that blow!
+Cheerfully would I begin to build a fortune over again--singing!  Ha!
+the woman has threatened it before.  It's probably feline play with us.'
+
+His chin took support, he frowned.
+
+'You may have touched her.'
+
+'She won't be touched, and she won't be driven.  What 's the secret of
+her?  I can't guess, I never could.  She's a riddle.'
+
+'Riddles with wigs and false teeth have to be taken and shaken for the
+ardently sought secret to reveal itself,' said Mr. Fenellan.
+
+His picture, with the skeleton issue of any shaking, smote Mr. Radnor's
+eyes, they turned over.  'Oh!--her charms!  She had a desperate belief in
+her beauty.  The woman 's undoubtedly charitable; she's not without a
+mind--sort of mind: well, it shows no crack till it's put to use.  Heart!
+yes, against me she has plenty of it.  They say she used to be courted;
+she talked of it: "my courtiers, Mr. Victor!"  There, heaven forgive me,
+I wouldn't mock at her to another.'
+
+'It looks as if she were only inexorably human,' said Mr. Fenellan,
+crushing a delicious gulp of the wine, that foamed along the channel to
+flavour.  'We read of the tester of a bandit-bed; and it flattened unwary
+recumbents to pancakes.  An escape from the like of that seems pleadable,
+should be: none but the drowsy would fail to jump out and run, or the
+insane.'
+
+Mr. Radnor was taken with the illustration of his case.  'For the sake of
+my sanity, it was!  to preserve my . . . . but any word makes nonsense of
+it.  Could--I must ask you--could any sane man--you were abroad in those
+days, horrible days!  and never met her: I say, could you consent to be
+tied--I admit the vow, ceremony, so forth-tied to--I was barely twenty-
+one: I put it to you, Fenellan, was it in reason an engagement--which
+is, I take it, a mutual plight of faith, in good faith; that is, with
+capacity on both sides to keep the engagement: between the man you know
+I was in youth and a more than middle-aged woman crazy up to the edge of
+the cliff--as Colney says half the world is, and she positively is when
+her spite is roused.  No, Fenellan, I have nothing on my conscience with
+regard to the woman.  She had wealth: I left her not one penny the worse
+for--but she was not one to reckon it, I own.  She could be generous,
+was, with her money.  If she had struck this blow--I know she thought of
+it: or if she would strike it now, I could not only forgive her, I could
+beg forgiveness.'
+
+A sight of that extremity fetched prickles to his forehead.
+
+'You've borne your part bravely, my friend.'
+
+'I!' Mr. Radnor shrugged at mention of his personal burdens.  'Praise my
+Nataly if you like!  Made for one another, if ever two in this world!
+You know us both, and do you doubt it?  The sin would have been for us
+two to meet and--but enough when I say, that I am she, she me, till death
+and beyond it: that's my firm faith.  Nataly teaches me the religion of
+life, and you may learn what that is when you fall in love with a woman.
+Eighteen-nineteen-twenty years!'
+
+Tears fell from him, two drops.  He blinked, bugled in his throat, eyed
+his watch, and smiled: 'The finishing glass!  We should have had to put
+Colney to bed.  Few men stand their wine.  You and I are not lamed by it;
+we can drink and do business: my first experience in the City was, that
+the power to drink--keeping a sound head--conduces to the doing of
+business.'
+
+'It's a pleasant way of instructing men to submit to their conqueror.'
+
+'If it doubles the energies, mind.'
+
+'Not if it fiddles inside.  I confess to that effect upon me.  I've a
+waltz going on, like the snake with the tail in his mouth, eternal; and
+it won't allow of a thought upon Investments.'
+
+'Consult me to-morrow,' said Mr. Radnor, somewhat pained for having
+inconsiderately misled the man he had hitherto helpfully guided.
+'You've looked at the warehouse?'
+
+'That's performed.'
+
+'Make a practice of getting over as much of your business in the early
+morning as you well can.'
+
+Mr. Radnor added hints of advice to a frail humanity he was indulgent,
+the giant spoke in good fellowship.  It would have been to have strained
+his meaning, for purposes of sarcasm upon him, if one had taken him to
+boast of a personal exemption from our common weakness.
+
+He stopped, and laughed: 'Now I 'm pumping my pulpit-eh?  You come with
+us to Lakelands.  I drive the ladies down to my office, ten A.M.: if it's
+fine; train half-past.  We take a basket.  By the way, I had no letter
+from Dartrey last mail.'
+
+'He has buried his wife.  It happens to some men.'
+
+Mr. Radnor stood gazing.  He asked for the name of the place of the
+burial.  He heard without seizing it.  A simulacrum spectre-spark of
+hopefulness shot up in his imagination, glowed and quivered, darkening at
+the utterance of the Dutch syllables, leaving a tinge of witless envy.
+Dartrey--Fenellan had buried the wife whose behaviour vexed and
+dishonoured him: and it was in Africa!  One would have to go to Africa to
+be free of the galling.  But Dartrey had gone, and he was free!--The
+strange faint freaks of our sensations when struck to leap and throw off
+their load after a long affliction, play these disorderly pranks on the
+brain; and they are faint, but they come in numbers, they are recurring,
+always in ambush.  We do not speak of them: we have not words to stamp
+the indefinite things; generally we should leave them unspoken if we had
+the words; we know them as out of reason: they haunt us, pluck at us,
+fret us, nevertheless.
+
+Dartrey free, he was relieved of the murderous drama incessantly in the
+mind of shackled men.
+
+It seemed like one of the miracles of a divine intervention, that Dartrey
+should be free, suddenly free; and free while still a youngish man.  He
+was in himself a wonderful fellow, the pick of his country for vigour,
+gallantry, trustiness, high-mindedness; his heavenly good fortune decked
+him as a prodigy.
+
+'No harm to the head from that fall of yours?' Mr. Fenellan said.
+
+'None.' Mr. Radnor withdrew his hand from head to hat, clapped it on and
+cried cheerily: 'Now to business'; as men may, who have confidence in
+their ability to concentrate an instant attention upon the substantial.
+'You dine with us.  The usual Quartet: Peridon, Pempton, Colney, Yatt, or
+Catkin: Priscilla Graves and Nataly--the Rev. Septimus; Cormyn and his
+wife: Young Dudley Sowerby and I--flutes: he has precision, as naughty
+Fredi said, when some one spoke of expression.  In the course of the
+evening, Lady Grace, perhaps: you like her.'
+
+'Human nature in the upper circle is particularly likeable.'
+
+'Fenellan,' said Mr. Radnor, emboldened to judge hopefully of his
+fortunes by mere pressure of the thought of Dartrey's, 'I put it to you:
+would you say, that there is anything this time behind your friend
+Carling's report?'
+
+Although it had not been phrased as a report, Mr. Fenellan's answering
+look and gesture, and a run of indiscriminate words, enrolled it in that
+form, greatly to the inspiriting of Mr. Radnor.
+
+Old Veuve in one, to the soul of Old Veuve in the other, they recalled a
+past day or two, touched the skies; and merriment or happiness in the
+times behind them held a mirror to the present: or the hour of the
+reverse of happiness worked the same effect by contrast: so that notions
+of the singular election of us by Dame Fortune, sprang like vinous
+bubbles.  For it is written, that however powerful you be, you shall not
+take the Winegod on board to entertain him as a simple passenger; and you
+may captain your vessel, you may pilot it, and keep to your reckonings,
+and steer for all the ports you have a mind to, even to doing profitable
+exchange with Armenian and Jew, and still you shall do the something
+more, which proves that the Winegod is on board: he is the pilot of your
+blood if not the captain of your thoughts.
+
+Mr. Fenellan was unused to the copious outpouring of Victor Radnor's
+confidences upon his domestic affairs; and the unwonted excitement of
+Victor's manner of speech would have perplexed him, had there not been
+such a fiddling of the waltz inside him.
+
+Payment for the turtle and the bottles of Old Veuve was performed
+apart with Benjamin, while Simeon Fenellan strolled out of the house,
+questioning a tumbled mind as to what description of suitable
+entertainment, which would be dancing and flirting and fal-lallery in the
+season of youth, London City could provide near meridian hours for a man
+of middle age carrying his bottle of champagne, like a guest of an old-
+fashioned wedding-breakfast.  For although he could stand his wine as
+well as his friend, his friend's potent capacity martially after the
+feast to buckle to business at a sign of the clock, was beyond him.
+It pointed to one of the embodied elements, hot from Nature's workshop.
+It told of the endurance of powers, that partly explained the successful,
+astonishing career of his friend among a people making urgent, if
+unequal, demands perpetually upon stomach and head.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE LONDON WALK WESTWARD
+
+In that nationally interesting Poem, or Dramatic Satire, once famous,
+THE RAJAH IN LONDON (London, Limbo and Sons, 1889), now obliterated
+under the long wash of Press-matter, the reflection--not unknown to
+philosophical observers, and natural perhaps in the mind of an Oriental
+Prince--produced by his observation of the march of London citizens
+Eastward at morn, Westward at eve, attributes their practice to a
+survival of the Zoroastrian form of worship.  His Minister, favourable
+to the people or for the sake of fostering an idea in his Master's head,
+remarks, that they show more than the fidelity of the sunflower to her
+God.  The Rajah, it would appear, frowns interrogatively, in the princely
+fashion, accusing him of obscureness of speech:--princes and the louder
+members of the grey public are fraternally instant to spurn at the whip
+of that which they do not immediately comprehend.  It is explained by the
+Minister: not even the flower, he says, would hold constant, as they, to
+the constantly unseen--a trebly cataphractic Invisible.  The Rajah
+professes curiosity to know how it is that the singular people nourish
+their loyalty, since they cannot attest to the continued being of the
+object in which they put their faith.  He is informed by his prostrate
+servant of a settled habit they have of diligently seeking their
+Divinity, hidden above, below; and of copiously taking inside them doses
+of what is denied to their external vision: thus they fortify credence
+chemically on an abundance of meats and liquors; fire they eat, and they
+drink fire; they become consequently instinct with fire.  Necessarily
+therefore they believe in fire.  Believing, they worship.  Worshipping,
+they march Eastward at morn, Westward at eve.  For that way lies the key,
+this way the cupboard, of the supplies, their fuel.
+
+According to Stage directions, THE RAJAH AND HIS MINISTER Enter a Gin-
+Palace.--It is to witness a service that they have learnt to appreciate
+as Anglicanly religious.
+
+On the step of the return to their Indian clime, they speak of the hatted
+sect, which is most, or most commercially, succoured and fattened by our
+rule there: they wave adieu to the conquering Islanders, as to 'Parsees
+beneath a cloud.'
+
+The two are seen last on the deck of the vessel, in perusal of a medical
+pamphlet composed of statistics and sketches, traceries, horrid blots,
+diagrams with numbers referring to notes, of the various maladies caused
+by the prolonged prosecution of that form of worship.
+
+'But can they suffer so and live?' exclaims the Rajah, vexed by the
+physical sympathetic twinges which set him wincing.
+
+'Science,' his Minister answers, 'took them up where Nature, in pity of
+their martyrdom, dropped them.  They do not live; they are engines,
+insensible things of repairs and patches; insteamed to pursue their
+infuriate course, to the one end of exhausting supplies for the renewing
+of them, on peril of an instant suspension if they deviate a step or
+stop: nor do they.'
+
+The Rajah is of opinion, that he sails home with the key of the riddle of
+their power to vanquish.  In some apparent allusion to an Indian story of
+a married couple who successfully made their way, he accounts for their
+solid and resistless advance, resembling that of--
+
+                         The doubly-wedded man and wife,
+               Pledged to each other and against the world
+               With mutual union.
+
+One would like to think of the lengthened tide-flux of pedestrian
+citizens facing South-westward, as being drawn by devout attraction to
+our nourishing luminary: at the hour, mark, when the Norland cloud-king,
+after a day of wild invasion, sits him on his restful bank of bluefish
+smack-o'-cheek red above Whitechapel, to spy where his last puff of icy
+javelins pierces and dismembers the vapoury masses in cluster about the
+circle of flame descending upon the greatest and most elevated of
+Admirals at the head of the Strand, with illumination of smoke-plumed
+chimneys, house-roofs, window-panes, weather-vanes, monument and
+pedimental monsters, and omnibus umbrella.  One would fair believe that
+they advance admireing; they are assuredly made handsome by the beams.
+No longer mere concurrent atoms of the furnace of business (from coal-
+dust to sparks, rushing, as it were, on respiratory blasts of an enormous
+engine's centripetal and centrifugal energy), their step is leisurely to
+meet the rosy Dinner, which is ever a see-saw with the God of Light in
+his fall; the mask of the noble human visage upon them is not roughened,
+as at midday, by those knotted hard ridges of the scrambler's hand seen
+from forehead down to jaw; when indeed they have all the appearance of
+sour scientific productions.  And unhappily for the national portrait, in
+the Poem quoted, the Rajah's Minister chose an hour between morning and
+meridian, or at least before an astonished luncheon had come to composure
+inside their persons, for drawing his Master's attention to the quaint
+similarity of feature in the units of the busy antish congregates they
+had travelled so far to visit and to study:
+
+                              These Britons wear
+               The driven and perplexed look of men
+               Begotten hastily 'twixt business hours
+
+It could not have been late afternoon.
+
+These Orientals should have seen them, with Victor Radnor among them,
+fronting the smoky splendours of the sunset.  In April, the month of
+piled and hurried cloud, it is a Rape of the Sabines overhead from all
+quarters, either one of the winds brawnily larcenous; and London, smoking
+royally to the open skies, builds images of a dusty epic fray for
+possession of the portly dames.  There is immensity, swinging motion,
+collision, dusky richness of colouring, to the sight; and to the mind
+idea.  London presents it.  If we can allow ourselves a moment for not
+inquireing scrupulously (you will do it by inhaling the aroma of the ripe
+kitchen hour), here is a noble harmony of heaven and the earth of the
+works of man, speaking a grander tongue than barren sea or wood or
+wilderness.  Just a moment; it goes; as, when a well-attuned barrel-organ
+in a street has drawn us to recollections of the Opera or Italy, another
+harshly crashes, and the postman knocks at doors, and perchance a
+costermonger cries his mash of fruit, a beggar woman wails her hymn.
+For the pinched are here, the dinnerless, the weedy, the gutter-growths,
+the forces repressing them.  That grand tongue of the giant City inspires
+none human to Bardic eulogy while we let those discords be.  An
+embittered Muse of Reason prompts her victims to the composition of the
+adulatory Essay and of the Leading Article, that she may satiate an angry
+irony 'upon those who pay fee for their filling with the stuff.  Song of
+praise she does not permit.  A moment of satisfaction in a striking
+picture is accorded, and no more.  For this London, this England, Europe,
+world, but especially this London, is rather a thing for hospital
+operations than for poetic rhapsody; in aspect, too, streaked scarlet
+and pock-pitted under the most cumbrous of jewelled tiaras; a Titanic
+work of long-tolerated pygmies; of whom the leaders, until sorely
+discomforted in body and doubtful in soul, will give gold and labour,
+will impose restrictions upon activity, to maintain a conservatism of
+diseases.  Mind is absent, or somewhere so low down beneath material
+accumulations that it is inexpressive, powerless to drive the ponderous
+bulk to such excisings, purgeings, purifyings as might--as may, we will
+suppose, render it acceptable, for a theme of panegyric, to the Muse of
+Reason; ultimately, with her consent, to the Spirit of Song.
+
+But first there must be the cleansing.  When Night has fallen upon
+London, the Rajah remarks:
+
+               Monogamic Societies present
+               A decent visage and a hideous rear.
+
+His Minister (satirically, or in sympathetic Conservatism) would have
+them not to move on, that they may preserve among beholders the
+impression of their handsome frontage.  Night, however, will come; and
+they, adoreing the decent face, are moved on, made to expose what the
+Rajah sees.  Behind his courteousness, he is an antagonistic observer of
+his conquerors; he pushes his questions farther than the need for them;
+his Minister the same; apparently to retain the discountenanced people in
+their state of exposure.  Up to the time of the explanation of the puzzle
+on board the departing vessel (on the road to Windsor, at the Premier's
+reception, in the cell of the Police, in the presence of the Magistrate-
+whose crack of a totally inverse decision upon their case, when he
+becomes acquainted with the titles and station of these imputedly
+peccant, refreshes them), they hold debates over the mysterious
+contrarieties of a people professing in one street what they confound
+in the next, and practising by day a demureness that yells with the
+cat of the tiles at night.
+
+Granting all that, it being a transient novelist's business to please the
+light-winged hosts which live for the hour, and give him his only chance
+of half of it, let him identify himself with them, in keeping to the
+quadrille on the surface and shirking the disagreeable.
+
+Clouds of high colour above London City are as the light of the Goddess
+to lift the angry heroic head over human.  They gloriously transfigure.
+A Murillo beggar is not more precious than sight of London in any of the
+streets admitting coloured cloud-scenes; the cunning of the sun's hand so
+speaks to us.  And if haply down an alley some olive mechanic of street-
+organs has quickened little children's legs to rhythmic footing, they
+strike on thoughts braver than pastoral.  Victor Radnor, lover of the
+country though he was, would have been the first to say it.  He would
+indeed have said it too emphatically.  Open London as a theme, to a
+citizen of London ardent for the clear air out of it, you have roused an
+orator; you have certainly fired a magazine, and must listen to his
+reminiscences of one of its paragraphs or pages.
+
+The figures of the hurtled fair ones in sky were wreathing Nelson's
+cocked hat when Victor, distinguishably bright-faced amid a crowd of the
+irradiated, emerged from the tideway to cross the square, having thoughts
+upon Art, which were due rather to the suggestive proximity of the
+National Gallery than to the Flemish mouldings of cloud-forms under
+Venetian brushes.  His purchases of pictures had been his unhappiest
+ventures.  He had relied and reposed on the dicta of newspaper critics;
+who are sometimes unanimous, and are then taken for guides, and are
+fatal.  He was led to the conclusion that our modern-lauded pictures
+do not ripen.  They have a chance of it, if abused.  But who thinks of
+buying the abused?  Exalted by the critics, they have, during the days
+of Exhibition, a glow, a significance or a fun, abandoning them where
+examination is close and constant, and the critic's trumpet-note
+dispersed to the thinness of the fee for his blowing.  As to foreign
+pictures, classic pictures, Victor had known his purse to leap for a
+Raphael with a history in stages of descent from the Master, and critics
+to swarm: a Raphael of the dealers, exposed to be condemned by the
+critics, universally derided.  A real Raphael in your house is
+aristocracy to the roof-tree.  But the wealthy trader will reach to
+title before he may hope to get the real Raphael or a Titian.  Yet he
+is the one who would, it may be, after enjoyment of his prize, bequeath
+it to the nation--PRESENTED TO THE NATION BY VICTOR MONTGOMERY RADNOR.
+There stood the letters in gilt; and he had a thrill of his generosity;
+for few were the generous acts he could not perform; and if an object
+haunted the deed, it came of his trader's habit of mind.
+
+He revelled in benevolent projects of gifts to the nation, which would
+coat a sensitive name.  Say, an ornamental City Square, flowers,
+fountains, afternoon bands of music--comfortable seats in it, and a
+shelter, and a ready supply of good cheap coffee or tea.  Tobacco?
+why not rolls of honest tobacco! nothing so much soothes the labourer.
+A volume of plans for the benefit of London smoked out of each ascending
+pile in his brain.  London is at night a moaning outcast round the
+policeman's' legs.  What of an all-night-long, cosy, brightly lighted,
+odoriferous coffee-saloon for rich or poor, on the model of the
+hospitable Paduan?  Owner of a penny, no soul among us shall be
+rightly an outcast .  .  .  .
+
+Dreams of this kind are taken at times by wealthy people as a cordial at
+the bar of benevolent intentions.  But Victor was not the man to steal
+his refreshments in that known style.  He meant to make deeds of them,
+as far as he could, considering their immense extension; and except for
+the sensitive social name, he was of single-minded purpose.
+
+Turning to the steps of a chemist's shop to get a prescription made up
+for his Nataly's doctoring of her domestics, he was arrested by a rap on
+his elbow; and no one was near; and there could not be a doubt of the
+blow--a sharp hard stroke, sparing the funny-bone, but ringing.  His
+head, at the punctilio bump, throbbed responsively--owing to which or
+indifference to the prescription, as of no instant requirement, he
+pursued his course, resembling mentally the wanderer along a misty beach,
+who hears cannon across the waters.
+
+He certainly had felt it.  He remembered the shock: he could not remember
+much of pain.  How about intimations?  His asking caused a smile.
+
+Very soon the riddle answered itself.  He had come into view of the
+diminutive marble cavalier of the infantile cerebellum; recollecting a
+couplet from the pen of the disrespectful Satirist Peter, he thought of a
+fall: his head and his elbow responded simultaneously to the thought.
+
+All was explained save his consequent rightabout from the chemist's shop:
+and that belongs to the minor involutions of circumstances and the will.
+It passed like a giver's wrinkle.  He read the placards of the Opera;
+reminding himself of the day when it was the single Opera-house; and now
+we have two-or three.  We have also a distracting couple of Clowns and
+Pantaloons in our Pantomimes: though Colney says that the multiplication
+of the pantaloon is a distinct advance to representative truth--and
+bother Colney!  Two Columbines also.  We forbear to speak of men, but
+where is the boy who can set his young heart upon two Columbines at once!
+Victor felt the boy within him cold to both: and in his youth he had
+doated on the solitary twirling spangled lovely Fairy.  The tale of a
+delicate lady dancer leaping as the kernel out of a nut from the arms of
+Harlequin to the legalized embrace of a wealthy brewer, and thenceforth
+living, by repute, with unagitated legs, as holy a matron, despite her
+starry past, as any to be shown in a country breeding the like
+abundantly, had always delighted him.  It seemed a reconcilement of
+opposing stations, a defeat of Puritanism.  Ay, and poor women!--women in
+the worser plight under the Puritan's eye.  They may be erring and good:
+yes, finding the man to lift them the one step up!  Read the history of
+the error.  But presently we shall teach the Puritan to act by the
+standards of his religion.  All is coming right--must come right.  Colney
+shall be confounded.
+
+Hereupon Victor hopped on to Fenellan's hint regarding the designs of
+Mrs. Burman.
+
+His Nataly might have to go through a short sharp term of scorching--
+Godiva to the gossips.
+
+She would come out of it glorified.  She would be reconciled with her
+family.  With her story of her devotion to the man loving her, the world
+would know her for the heroine she was: a born lady, in appearance and
+manner an empress among women.  It was a story to be pleaded in any
+court, before the sternest public.  Mrs. Burman had thrown her into
+temptation's way.  It was a story to touch the heart, as none other ever
+written of over all the earth was there a woman equalling his Nataly!
+
+And their Nesta would have a dowry to make princesses envious:--she would
+inherit .  .  .  he ran up an arithmetical column, down to a line of
+figures in addition, during three paces of his feet.  Dartrey Fenellan
+had said of little Nesta once, that she had a nature pure and sparkling
+as mid-sea foam.  Happy he who wins her!  But she was one of the young
+women who are easily pleased and hardly enthralled.  Her father strained
+his mind for the shape of the man to accomplish the feat.  Whether she
+had an ideal of a youth in her feminine head, was beyond his guessing.
+She was not the damsel to weave a fairy waistcoat for the identical
+prince, and try it upon all comers to discover him: as is done by some;
+excuseably, if we would be just.  Nesta was of the elect, for whom
+excuses have not to be made.  She would probably like a flute-player
+best; because her father played the flute, and she loved him--laughably
+a little maiden's reason!  Her father laughed at her.
+
+Along the street of Clubs, where a bruised fancy may see black balls
+raining, the narrow way between ducal mansions offers prospect of the
+sweep of greensward, all but touching up to the sunset to draw it to the
+dance.
+
+Formerly, in his very early youth, he clasped a dream of gaining way
+to an alliance with one of these great surrounding houses; and he had
+a passion for the acquisition of money as a means.  And it has to be
+confessed, he had sacrificed in youth a slice of his youth, to gain it
+without labour--usually a costly purchase.  It had ended disastrously: or
+say, a running of the engine off the rails, and a speedy re-establishment
+of traffic.  Could it be a loss, that had led to the winning of his
+Nataly?  Can we really loathe the first of the steps when the one in
+due sequence, cousin to it, is a blessedness?  If we have been righted
+to health by a medical draught, we are bound to be respectful to our
+drug.  And so we are, in spite of Nature's wry face and shiver at a
+mention of what we went through during those days, those horrible days:
+--hide them!
+
+The smothering of them from sight set them sounding he had to listen.
+Colney Durance accused him of entering into bonds with somebody's
+grandmother for the simple sake of browsing on her thousands: a picture
+of himself too abhorrent to Victor to permit of any sort of acceptance.
+Consequently he struck away to the other extreme of those who have a
+choice in mixed motives: he protested that compassion had been the cause
+of it.  Looking at the circumstance now, he could see, allowing for human
+frailty-perhaps a wish to join the ranks of the wealthy compassion for
+the woman as the principal motive.  How often had she not in those old
+days praised his generosity for allying his golden youth to her withered
+age--Mrs. Burman's very words!  And she was a generous woman or had been:
+she was generous in saying that.  Well, and she was generous in having a
+well-born, well-bred beautiful young creature like Nataly for her
+companion, when it was a case of need for the dear girl; and
+compassionately insisting, against remonstrances: they were spoken by
+him, though they were but partial.  How, then, had she become--at least,
+how was it that she could continue to behave as the vindictive Fury who
+persecuted remorselessly, would give no peace, poisoned the wells round
+every place where he and his dear one pitched their tent!
+
+But at last she had come to charity, as he could well believe.  Not too
+late!  Victor's feeling of gratitude to Mrs. Burman assured him it was
+genuine because of his genuine conviction, that she had determined to end
+her incomprehensibly lengthened days in reconcilement with him: and he
+had always been ready to 'forget and forgive.' A truly beautiful old
+phrase!  It thrilled off the most susceptible of men.
+
+His well-kept secret of the spacious country-house danced him behind a
+sober demeanour from one park to another; and along beside the drive to
+view of his townhouse--unbeloved of the inhabitants, although by
+acknowledgement it had, as Fredi funnily drawled, to express her sense
+of justice in depreciation, 'good accommodation.'  Nataly was at home,
+he was sure.  Time to be dressing: sun sets at six-forty, he said, and
+glanced at the stained West, with an accompanying vision of outspread
+primroses flooding banks of shadowy fields near Lakelands.
+
+He crossed the road and rang.
+
+Upon the opening of the door, there was a cascade of muslin downstairs.
+His darling Fredi stood out of it, a dramatic Undine.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+NATALY
+
+'Il segreto!' the girl cried commandingly, with a forefinger at his
+breast.
+
+He crossed arms, toning in similar recitative, with anguish,
+'Dove volare!'
+
+They joined in half a dozen bars of operatic duet.
+
+She flew to him, embraced and kissed.
+
+'I must have it, my papa! unlock.  I've been spying the bird on its
+hedgerow nest so long!  And this morning, my own dear cunning papa,
+weren't you as bare as winter twigs?  "Tomorrow perhaps we will have a
+day in the country."  To go and see the nest?  Only, please, not a big
+one.  A real nest; where mama and I can wear dairymaid's hat and apron
+all day--the style you like; and strike roots.  We've been torn away two
+or three times: twice, I know.'
+
+'Fixed, this time; nothing shall tear us up,' said her father, moving on
+to the stairs, with an arm about her.
+
+'So, it is .  .  . ?'
+
+'She's amazed at her cleverness!'
+
+'A nest for three?'
+
+'We must have a friend or two.'
+
+'And pretty country?'
+
+'Trust her papa for that.'
+
+'Nice for walking and running over fields?  No rich people?'
+
+'How escape that rabble in England! as Colney says.  It's a place for
+being quite independent of neighbours, free as air.'
+
+'Oh!  bravo!'
+
+'And Fredi will have her horse, and mama her pony-carriage; and Fredi can
+have a swim every Summer morning.'
+
+'A swim?' Her note was dubious.  'A river?'
+
+'A good long stretch--fairish, fairish.  Bit of a lake; bathing-shed; the
+Naiad's bower: pretty water to see.'
+
+'Ah.  And has the house a name?'
+
+'Lakelands.  I like the name.'
+
+'Papa gave it the name!'
+
+'There's nothing he can conceal from his girl.  Only now and then a
+little surprise.'
+
+'And his girl is off her head with astonishment.  But tell me, who has
+been sharing the secret with you?'
+
+'Fredi strikes home!  And it is true, you dear; I must have a confidant:
+Simeon Fenellan.'
+
+'Not Mr. Durance?'
+
+He shook out a positive negative.  'I leave Col to his guesses.  He'd
+have been prophesying fire the works before the completion.'
+
+'Then it is not a dear old house, like Craye and Creckholt?'
+
+'Wait and see to-morrow.'
+
+He spoke of the customary guests for concert practice; the music,
+instrumental and vocal; quartet, duet, solo; and advising the girl to be
+quick, as she had but twenty-five minutes, he went humming and trilling
+into his dressing-room.
+
+Nesta signalled at her mother's door for permission to enter.  She
+slipped in, saw that the maid was absent, and said: 'Yes, mama; and
+prepare, I feared it; I was sure.'
+
+Her mother breathed a little moan: 'Not a cottage?'
+
+'He has not mentioned it to Mr. Durance.'
+
+'Why not?'
+
+'Mr. Fenellan has been his confidant.'
+
+'My darling, we did wrong to let it go on, without speaking.  You don't
+know for certain yet?'
+
+'It's a large estate, mama, and a big new house.'
+
+Nataly's bosom sank.  'Ah me! here's misery!  I ought to have known.
+And too late now it has gone so far!  But I never imagined he would be
+building.'
+
+She caught herself languishing at her toilette-glass, as, if her beauty
+were at stake; and shut her eyelids angrily.  To be looking in that
+manner, for a mere suspicion, was too foolish.  But Nesta's divinations
+were target-arrows; they flew to the mark.  Could it have been expected
+that Victor would ever do anything on a small scale?  O the dear little
+lost lost cottage!  She thought of it with a strain of the arms of
+womanhood's longing in the unblessed wife for a babe.  For the secluded
+modest cottage would not rack her with the old anxieties, beset her with
+suspicions.  .  .  .
+
+'My child, you won't possibly have time before the dinner-hour,' she said
+to Nesta, dismissing her and taking her kiss of comfort with a short and
+straining look out of the depths.
+
+Those bitter doubts of the sentiments of neighbours are an incipient
+dislike, when one's own feelings to the neighbours are kind, could be
+affectionate.  We are distracted, perverted, made strangers to ourselves
+by a false position.
+
+She heard his voice on a carol.  Men do not feel this doubtful position
+as women must.  They have not the same to endure; the world gives them
+land to tread, where women are on breaking seas.  Her Nesta knew no more
+than the pain of being torn from a home she loved.  But now the girl was
+older, and if once she had her imagination awakened, her fearful
+directness would touch the spot, question, bring on the scene to-come,
+necessarily to come, dreaded much more than death by her mother.  But
+if it might be postponed till the girl was nearer to an age of grave
+understanding, with some knowledge of our world, some comprehension of a
+case that could be pleaded!
+
+He sang: he never acknowledged a trouble, he dispersed it; and in her
+present wrestle with the scheme of a large country estate involving new
+intimacies, anxieties, the courtship of rival magnates, followed by the
+wretched old cloud, and the imposition upon them to bear it in silence
+though they knew they could plead a case, at least before charitable and
+discerning creatures or before heaven, the despondent lady could have
+asked whether he was perfectly sane.
+
+Who half so brilliantly!--Depreciation of him, fetched up at a stroke the
+glittering armies of her enthusiasm.  He had proved it; he proved it
+daily in conflicts and in victories that dwarfed emotional troubles like
+hers: yet they were something to bear, hard to bear, at times unbearable.
+
+But those were times of weakness.  Let anything be doubted rather than
+the good guidance of the man who was her breath of life!  Whither he led,
+let her go, not only submissively, exultingly.
+
+Thus she thought, under pressure of the knowledge, that unless rushing
+into conflicts bigger than conceivable, she had to do it, and should
+therefore think it.
+
+This was the prudent woman's clear deduction from the state wherein
+she found herself, created by the one first great step of the mad woman.
+Her surrender then might be likened to the detachment of a flower on the
+river's bank by swell of flood: she had no longer root of her own; away
+she sailed, through beautiful scenery, with occasionally a crashing fall,
+a turmoil, emergence from a vortex, and once more the sunny whirling
+surface.  Strange to think, she had not since then power to grasp in her
+abstract mind a notion of stedfastness without or within.
+
+But, say not the mad, say the enamoured woman.  Love is a madness, having
+heaven's wisdom in it--a spark.  But even when it is driving us on the
+breakers, call it love: and be not unworthy of it, hold to it.  She and
+Victor had drunk of a cup.  The philtre was in her veins, whatever the
+directions of the rational mind.
+
+Exulting or regretting, she had to do it, as one in the car with a racing
+charioteer.  Or up beside a more than Titanically audacious balloonist.
+For the charioteer is bent on a goal; and Victor's course was an
+ascension from heights to heights.  He had ideas, he mastered Fortune.
+He conquered Nataly and held her subject, in being above his ambition;
+which was now but an occupation for his powers, while the aim of his life
+was at the giving and taking of simple enjoyment.  In spite of his fits
+of unreasonableness in the means--and the woman loving him could trace
+them to a breath of nature--his gentle good friendly innocent aim in life
+was of this very simplest; so wonderful, by contrast with his powers,
+that she, assured of it as she was by experience of him, was touched,
+in a transfusion of her feelings through lucent globes of admiration and
+of tenderness, to reverence.  There had been occasions when her wish for
+the whole world to have proof and exhibition of his greatness, goodness,
+and simplicity amid his gifts, prompted her incitement of him to stand
+forth eminently: 'lead a kingdom,' was the phrase behind the curtain
+within her shy bosom); and it revealed her to herself, upon reflection,
+as being still the Nataly who drank the cup with him, to join her fate
+with his.
+
+And why not?  Was that regretted?  Far from it.  In her maturity, the
+woman was unable to send forth any dwelling thought or more than a flight
+of twilight fancy, that cancelled the deed of her youth, and therewith
+seemed to expunge near upon the half--of her term of years.  If it came
+to consideration of her family and the family's opinion of her conduct,
+her judgement did not side with them or with herself, it whirled, swam to
+a giddiness and subsided.
+
+Of course, if she and Victor were to inhabit a large country-house,
+they might as well have remained at Craye Farm or at Creckholt; both
+places dear to them in turn.  Such was the plain sense of the surface
+question.  And how strange it was to her, that he, of the most quivering
+sensitiveness on her behalf; could not see, that he threw her into
+situations where hard words of men and women threatened about her head;
+where one or two might on a day, some day, be heard; and where, in the
+recollection of two years back, the word 'Impostor' had smacked her on
+both cheeks from her own mouth.
+
+Now once more they were to run the same round of alarms, undergo the love
+of the place, with perpetual apprehensions of having to leave it: alarms,
+throbbing suspicions, like those of old travellers through the haunted
+forest, where whispers have intensity of meaning, and unseeing we are
+seen, and unaware awaited.
+
+Nataly shook the rolls of her thick brown hair from her forehead; she
+took strength from a handsome look of resolution in the glass.  She could
+always honestly say, that her courage would not fail him.
+
+Victor tapped at the door; he stepped into the room, wearing his evening
+white flower over a more open white waistcoat; and she was composed and
+uninquiring.  Their Nesta was heard on the descent of the stairs, with a
+rattle of Donizetti's Il segreto to the skylights.
+
+He performed his never-omitted lover's homage.
+
+Nataly enfolded him in a homely smile.  'A country-house?  We go and see
+it to-morrow?'
+
+'And you've been pining for a country home, my dear soul.'
+
+'After the summer six weeks, the house in London does not seem a home to
+return to.'
+
+'And next day, Nataly draws five thousand pounds for the first sketch of
+the furniture.'
+
+'There is the Creckholt .  .  .' she had a difficulty in saying.
+
+'Part of it may do.  Lakelands requires--but you will see to-morrow.'
+
+After a close shutting of her eyes, she rejoined: 'It is not a cottage?'
+
+'Well, dear, no: when the Slave of the Lamp takes to building, he does
+not run up cottages.  And we did it without magic, all in a year; which
+is quite as good as a magical trick in a night.'  He drew her close to
+him.  'When was it my dear girl guessed me at work?'
+
+'It was the other dear girl.  Nesta is the guesser.'
+
+'You were two best of souls to keep from bothering me; and I might have
+had to fib; and we neither of us like that.'  He noticed a sidling of her
+look.  'More than the circumstances oblige:--to be frank.  But now we can
+speak of them.  Wait--and the change comes; and opportunely, I have
+found.  It's true we have waited long; my darling has had her worries.
+However, it 's here at last.  Prepare yourself.  I speak positively.
+You have to brace up for one sharp twitch--the woman's portion!  as
+Natata says--and it's over.' He looked into her eyes for comprehension;
+and not finding inquiry, resumed: 'Just in time for the entry into
+Lakelands.  With the pronouncement of the decree, we present the licence
+.  .  .  at an altar we've stood before, in spirit .  .  .  one of the
+ladies of your family to support you:--why not?  Not even then?'
+
+'No, Victor; they have cast me off.'
+
+'Count on my cousins, the Duvidney ladies.  Then we can say, that those
+two good old spinsters are less narrow than the Dreightons.  I have to
+confess I rather think I was to blame for leaving Creckholt.  Only,
+if I see my girl wounded, I hate the place that did the mischief.
+You and Fredi will clap hands for the country about Lakelands.'
+
+'Have you heard from her .  .  .  of her .  .  .  is it anything,
+Victor?'  Nataly asked him shyly; with not much of hope, but some
+readiness to be inflated.  The prospect of an entry into the big new
+house, among a new society, begirt by the old nightmares and fretting
+devils, drew her into staring daylight or furnace-light.
+
+He answered: 'Mrs. Burman has definitely decided.  In pity of us?--to be
+free herself?--who can say!  She 's a woman with a conscience--of a kind:
+slow, but it brings her to the point at last.  You know her, know her
+well.  Fenellan has it from her lawyer--her lawyer! a Mr. Carting;
+a thoroughly trustworthy man--'
+
+'Fenellan, as a reporter?'
+
+'Thoroughly to be trusted on serious matters.  I understand that Mrs.
+Burman:--her health is awful: yes, yes; poor woman!  poor woman!  we feel
+for her:--she has come to perceive her duty to those she leaves behind.
+Consider: she HAS used the rod.  She must be tired out--if human.  And
+she is.  One remembers traits.'
+
+Victor sketched one or two of the traits allusively to the hearer
+acquainted with them.  They received strong colouring from midday's Old
+Veuve in his blood.  His voice and words had a swing of conviction: they
+imparted vinousness to a heart athirst.
+
+The histrionic self-deceiver may be a persuasive deceiver of another,
+who is again, though not ignorant of his character, tempted to swallow
+the nostrums which have made so gallant a man of him: his imperceptible
+sensible playing of the part, on a substratum of sincereness, induces
+fascinatingly to the like performance on our side, that we may be armed
+as he is for enjoying the coveted reality through the partial simulation
+of possessing it.  And this is not a task to us when we have looked our
+actor in the face, and seen him bear the look, knowing that he is not
+intentionally untruthful; and when we incline to be captivated by his
+rare theatrical air of confidence; when it seems as an outside thought
+striking us, that he may not be altogether deceived in the present
+instance; when suddenly an expectation of the thing desired is born and
+swims in a credible featureless vagueness on a misty scene: and when we
+are being kissed and the blood is warmed.  In fine, here as everywhere
+along our history, when the sensations are spirited up to drown the mind,
+we become drift-matter of tides, metal to magnets.  And if we are women,
+who commonly allow the lead to men, getting it for themselves only by
+snaky cunning or desperate adventure, credulity--the continued trust in
+the man--is the alternative of despair.
+
+'But, Victor, I must ask,' Nataly said: 'you have it through Simeon
+Fenellan; you have not yourself received the letter from her lawyer?'
+
+'My knowledge of what she would do near the grave--poor soul, yes!  I
+shall soon be hearing.'
+
+'You do not, propose to enter this place until--until it is over?'
+
+'We enter this place, my love, without any sort of ceremony.  We live
+there independently, and we can we have quarters there for our friends.
+Our one neighbour is London--there!  And at Lakelands we are able to
+entertain London and wife;--our friends, in short; with some, what we
+have to call, satellites.  You inspect the house and grounds to-morrow
+--sure to be fair.  Put aside all but the pleasant recollections of Craye
+and Creckholt.  We start on a different footing.  Really nothing can be
+simpler.  Keeping your town-house, you are now and then in residence at
+Lakelands, where you entertain your set, teach them to feel the charm of
+country life: we have everything about us; could have had our own milk
+and cream up to London the last two months.  Was it very naughty?--
+I should have exploded my surprise!  You will see, you will see
+to-morrow.'
+
+Nataly nodded, as required.  'Good news from the mines?' she said.
+
+He answered: 'Dartrey is--yes, poor fellow! Dartrey is confident, from
+the yield of stones, that the value of our claim counts in a number of
+millions.  The same with the gold.  But gold-mines are lodgeings, not
+homes.'
+
+'Oh, Victor!  if money .  .  .  !  But why did you say "poor fellow" of
+Dartrey Fenellan?'
+
+'You know how he's .  .  .'
+
+'Yes, yes,' she said hastily.  'But has that woman been causing fresh
+anxiety?'
+
+'And Natata's chief hero on earth is not to be named a poor fellow,' said
+he, after a negative of the head on a subject they neither of them liked
+to touch.
+
+Then he remembered that Dartrey Fenellan was actually a lucky fellow;
+and he would have mentioned the circumstance confided to him by Simeon,
+but for a downright dread of renewing his painful fit of envy.  He had
+also another, more distant, very faint idea, that it had better not be
+mentioned just yet, for a reason entirely undefined.
+
+He consulted his watch.  The maid had come in for the robeing of her
+mistress.  Nataly's mind had turned to the little country cottage which
+would have given her such great happiness.  She raised her eyes to him;
+she could not check their filling; they were like a river carrying
+moonlight on the smooth roll of a fall.
+
+He loved the eyes, disliked the water in them.  With an impatient,
+'There, there!' and a smart affectionate look, he retired, thinking in
+our old satirical vein of the hopeless endeavour to satisfy a woman's
+mind without the intrusion of hard material statements, facts.  Even the
+best of women, even the most beautiful, and in their moments of supremest
+beauty, have this gross ravenousness for facts.  You must not expect to
+appease them unless you administer solids.  It would almost appear that
+man is exclusively imaginative and poetical; and that his mate, the fair,
+the graceful, the bewitching, with the sweetest and purest of natures,
+cannot help being something of a groveller.
+
+Nataly had likewise her thoughts.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+BETWEEN A GENERAL MAN OF THIN WORLD AND A PROFESSIONAL
+
+Rather earlier in the afternoon of that day, Simeon Fenellan, thinking
+of the many things which are nothing, and so melancholy for lack of
+amusements properly to follow Old Veuve, that he could ask himself
+whether he had not done a deed of night, to be blinking at his fellow-men
+like an owl all mad for the reveller's hoots and flights and mice and
+moony roundels behind his hypocritical judex air of moping composure,
+chanced on Mr. Carling, the solicitor, where Lincoln's Inn pumps lawyers
+into Fleet Street through the drain-pipe of Chancery Lane.  He was in the
+state of the wine when a shake will rouse the sluggish sparkles to foam.
+Sight of Mrs. Burman's legal adviser had instantly this effect upon him:
+his bubbling friendliness for Victor Radnor, and the desire of the voice
+in his bosom for ears to hear, combined like the rush of two waves
+together, upon which he may be figured as the boat: he caught at Mr.
+Carling's hand more heartily than their acquaintanceship quite
+sanctioned; but his grasp and his look of overflowing were immediately
+privileged; Mr. Carling, enjoying this anecdotal gentleman's conversation
+as he did, liked the warmth, and was flattered during the squeeze with a
+prospect of his wife and friends partaking of the fun from time to time.
+
+'I was telling my wife yesterday your story of the lady contrabandist: I
+don't think she has done laughing since,' Mr. Calling said.
+
+Fenellan fluted: 'Ah?' He had scent, in the eulogy of a story grown flat
+as Election hats, of a good sort of man in the way of men, a step or two
+behind the man of the world.  He expressed profound regret at not having
+heard the silvery ring of the lady's laughter.
+
+Carling genially conceived a real gratification to be conferred on his
+wife.  'Perhaps you will some day honour us?'
+
+'You spread gold-leaf over the days to come, sir.'
+
+'Now, if I might name the day?'
+
+'You lump the gold and make it current coin;--says the blushing bride,
+who ought not to have delivered herself so boldly, but she had forgotten
+her bashful part and spoilt the scene, though, luckily for the damsel,
+her swain was a lover of nature, and finding her at full charge, named
+the very next day of the year, and held her to it, like the complimentary
+tyrant he was.'
+
+'To-morrow, then!' said Carling intrepidly, on a dash of enthusiasm,
+through a haggard thought of his wife and the cook and the netting of
+friends at short notice.  He urged his eagerness to ask whether he might
+indeed have the satisfaction of naming to-morrow.
+
+'With happiness,' Fenellan responded.
+
+Mrs. Carling was therefore in for it.
+
+'To-morrow, half-past seven: as for company to meet you, we will do what
+we can.  You go Westward?'
+
+'To bed with the sun,' said the reveller.
+
+'Perhaps by Covent Garden?  I must give orders there.'
+
+'Orders given in Covent Garden, paint a picture for bachelors of the
+domestic Paradise an angel must help them to enter!  Ah, dear me!  Is
+there anything on earth to compare with the pride of a virtuous life?'
+
+'I was married at four and twenty,' said Carling, as one taking up
+the expository second verse of a poem; plain facts, but weighty and
+necessary: 'my wife was in her twentieth year: we have five children; two
+sons, three daughters, one married, with a baby.  So we are grandfather
+and mother, and have never regretted the first step, I may say for both
+of us.'
+
+'Think of it!  Good luck and sagacity joined hands overhead on the day
+you proposed to the lady: and I'd say, that all the credit is with her,
+but that it would seem to be at the expense of her sex.'
+
+'She would be the last to wish it, I assure you.'
+
+'True of all good women!  You encourage me, touching a matter of deep
+interest, not unknown to you.  The lady's warm heart will be with us.
+Probably she sees Mrs. Burman?'
+
+'Mrs. Burman Radnor receives no one.'
+
+A comic severity in the tone of the correction was deferentially accepted
+by Fenellan.
+
+'Pardon.  She flies her flag, with her captain wanting; and she has,
+queerly, the right.  So, then, the worthy dame who receives no one, might
+be treated, it struck us, conversationally, as a respectable harbour-
+hulk, with more history than top-honours.  But she has the indubitable
+legal right to fly them--to proclaim it; for it means little else.'
+
+'You would have her, if I follow you, divest herself of the name?'
+
+'Pin me to no significations, if you please, O shrewdest of the legal
+sort!  I have wit enough to escape you there.  She is no doubt an
+estimable person.'
+
+'Well, she is; she is in her way a very good woman.'
+
+'Ah.  You see, Mr. Carling, I cannot bring myself to rank her beside
+another lady, who has already claimed the title of me; and you will
+forgive me if I say, that your word "good" has a look of being stuck upon
+the features we know of her, like a coquette's naughty patch; or it's
+a jewel of an eye in an ebony idol: though I've heard tell she performs
+her charities.'
+
+'I believe she gives away three parts of her income and that is large.'
+
+'Leaving the good lady a fine fat fourth.'
+
+'Compare her with other wealthy people.'
+
+'And does she outshine the majority still with her personal attractions.
+
+Carling was instigated by the praise he had bestowed on his wife to
+separate himself from a female pretender so ludicrous; he sought
+Fenellan's nearest ear, emitting the sound of 'hum.'
+
+'In other respects, unimpeachable!'
+
+'Oh! quite!'
+
+'There was a fishfag of classic Billingsgate, who had broken her
+husband's nose with a sledgehammer fist, and swore before the magistrate,
+that the man hadn't a crease to complain of in her character.  We are
+condemned, Mr. Carling, sometimes to suffer in the flesh for the
+assurance we receive of the inviolability of those moral fortifications.'
+
+'Character, yes, valuable--I do wish you had named to-night for doing me
+the honour of dining with me!' said the lawyer impulsively, in a rapture
+of the appetite for anecdotes.  'I have a ripe Pichon Longueville, '65.'
+
+'A fine wine.  Seductive to hear of.  I dine with my friend Victor
+Radnor.  And he knows wine.--There are good women in the world, Mr.
+Carling, whose characters .  .  .'
+
+'Of course,'of course there are; and I could name you some.
+We lawyers . . . . !
+
+'You encounter all sorts.'
+
+'Between ourselves,' Carling sank his tones to the indiscriminate, where
+it mingled with the roar of London.
+
+'You do?' Fenellan hazarded a guess at having heard enlightened liberal
+opinions regarding the sex.  'Right!'
+
+'Many!'
+
+'I back you, Mr. Carling.'
+
+The lawyer pushed to yet more confidential communication, up to the verge
+of the clearly audible: he spoke of examples, experiences.  Fenellan
+backed him further.
+
+'Acting on behalf of clients, you understand, Mr. Fenellan.'
+
+'Professional, but charitable; I am with you.'
+
+'Poor things!  we--if we have to condemn--we owe them something.'
+
+'A kind word for poor Polly Venus, with all the world against her!  She
+doesn't hear it often.'
+
+'A real service,' Carling's voice deepened to the legal 'without
+prejudice,'--'I am bound to say it--a service to Society.'
+
+'Ah, poor wench!  And the kind of reward she gets?'
+
+'We can hardly examine .  .  .  mysterious dispensations .  .  .  here we
+are to make the best we can of it.'
+
+'For the creature Society's indebted to?  True.  And am I to think
+there's a body of legal gentlemen to join with you, my friend, in
+founding an Institution to distribute funds to preach charity over the
+country, and win compassion for her, as one of the principal persons of
+her time, that Society's indebted to for whatever it's indebted for?'
+
+'Scarcely that,' said Carling, contracting.
+
+'But you 're for great Reforms?'
+
+'Gradual.'
+
+'Then it's for Reformatories, mayhap.'
+
+'They would hardly be a cure.'
+
+'You 're in search of a cure?'
+
+'It would be a blessed discovery.'
+
+'But what's to become of Society?'
+
+'It's a puzzle to the cleverest.'
+
+'All through History, my dear Mr. Carling, we see that.
+
+'Establishments must have their sacrifices.  Beware of interfering: eh?'
+
+'By degrees, we may hope . . . .'
+
+'Society prudently shuns the topic; and so 'll we.  For we might tell of
+one another, in a fit of distraction, that t' other one talked of it, and
+we should be banished for an offence against propriety.  You should read
+my friend Durance's Essay on Society.  Lawyers are a buttress of Society.
+But, come: I wager they don't know what they support until they read that
+Essay.'
+
+Carling had a pleasant sense of escape, in not being personally asked to
+read the Essay, and not hearing that a copy of it should be forwarded to
+him.
+
+He said: 'Mr. Radnor is a very old friend?'
+
+'Our fathers were friends; they served in the same regiment for years.
+I was in India when Victor Radnor took the fatal!'
+
+'Followed by a second, not less .  .  . ?'
+
+'In the interpretation of a rigid morality arming you legal gentlemen to
+make it so!'
+
+'The Law must be vindicated.'
+
+'The law is a clumsy bludgeon.'
+
+'We think it the highest effort of human reason--the practical
+instrument.'
+
+'You may compare it to a rustic's finger on a fiddlestring, for the
+murdered notes you get out of the practical instrument.
+
+'I am bound to defend it, clumsy bludgeon or not.'
+
+'You are one of the giants to wield it, and feel humanly, when, by
+chance, down it comes on the foot an inch off the line.--Here's a peep
+of Old London; if the habit of old was not to wash windows.  I like these
+old streets!'
+
+'Hum,' Carling hesitated.  'I can remember when the dirt at the windows
+was appalling.'
+
+'Appealing to the same kind of stuff in the passing youngster's green-
+scum eye: it was.  And there your Law did good work.--You're for
+Bordeaux.  What is your word on Burgundy?'
+
+'Our Falernian!'
+
+'Victor Radnor has the oldest in the kingdom.  But he will have the best
+of everything.  A Romanee!  A Musigny!  Sip, my friend, you embrace the
+Goddess of your choice above.  You are up beside her at a sniff of that
+wine.--And lo, venerable Drury! we duck through the court, reminded a bit
+by our feelings of our first love, who hadn't the cleanest of faces or
+nicest of manners, but she takes her station in memory because we were
+boys then, and the golden halo of youth is upon her.'
+
+Carling, as a man of the world, acquiesced in souvenirs he did not share.
+He said urgently: 'Understand me; you speak of Mr. Radnor; pray, believe
+I have the greatest respect for Mr. Radnor's abilities.  He is one of our
+foremost men .  .  .  proud of him.  Mr. Radnor has genius; I have
+watched him; it is genius; he shows it in all he does; one of the
+memorable men of our times.  I can admire him, independent of--well,
+misfortune of that kind .  .  .  a mistaken early step.  Misfortune,
+it is to be named.  Between ourselves--we are men of the world--if one
+could see the way!  She occasionally .  .  .  as I have told you.  I have
+ventured suggestions.  As I have mentioned, I have received an impression
+.  .  .'
+
+'But still, Mr. Carling, if the lady doesn't release him and will keep
+his name, she might stop her cowardly persecutions.'
+
+'Can you trace them?'
+
+'Undisguised!'
+
+'Mrs. Burman Radnor is devout.  I should not exactly say revengeful.
+We have to discriminate.  I gather, that her animus is, in all honesty,
+directed at the--I quote--state of sin.  We are mixed, you know.'
+
+The Winegod in the blood of Fenellan gave a leap.  'But, fifty thousand
+times more mixed, she might any moment stop the state of sin, as she
+calls it, if it pleased her.'
+
+'She might try.  Our Judges look suspiciously on long delayed actions.
+And there are, too, women who regard the marriage-tie as indissoluble.
+She has had to combat that scruple.'
+
+'Believer in the renewing of the engagement overhead!--well.  But put a
+by-word to Mother Nature about the state of sin.  Where, do you imagine,
+she would lay it?  You'll say, that Nature and Law never agreed.  They
+ought.'
+
+'The latter deferring to the former?'
+
+'Moulding itself on her swelling proportions.  My dear dear sir, the
+state of sin was the continuing to live in defiance of, in contempt of,
+in violation of, in the total degradation of, Nature.'
+
+'He was under no enforcement to take the oath at the altar.'
+
+'He was a small boy tempted by a varnished widow, with pounds of barley
+sugar in her pockets;--and she already serving as a test-vessel or mortar
+for awful combinations in druggery!  Gilt widows are equal to decrees of
+Fate to us young ones.  Upon my word, the cleric who unites, and the Law
+that sanctions, they're the criminals.  Victor Radnor is the noblest of
+fellows, the very best friend a man can have.  I will tell you: he saved
+me, after I left the army, from living on the produce of my pen--which
+means, if there is to be any produce, the prostrating of yourself to the
+level of the round middle of the public: saved me from that!  Yes, Mr.
+Carling, I have trotted our thoroughfares a poor Polly of the pen; and it
+is owing to Victor Radnor that I can order my thoughts as an individual
+man again before I blacken paper.  Owing to him, I have a tenderness for
+mercenaries; having been one of them and knowing how little we can help
+it.  He is an Olympian--who thinks of them below.  The lady also is an
+admirable woman at all points.  The pair are a mated couple, such as you
+won't find in ten households over Christendom.  Are you aware of the
+story?'
+
+Carling replied: 'A story under shadow of the Law, has generally two very
+distinct versions.'
+
+'Hear mine.--And, by Jove!  a runaway cab.  No, all right.  But a crazy
+cab it is, and fit to do mischief in narrow Drury.  Except that it's
+sheer riff-raff here to knock over.'
+
+'Hulloa?--come!' quoth the wary lawyer.
+
+'There's the heart I wanted to rouse to hear me!  One may be sure that
+the man for old Burgundy has it big and sound, in spite of his legal
+practices; a dear good spherical fellow!  Some day, we'll hope, you will
+be sitting with us over a magnum of Victor Radnor's Romance Conti aged
+thirty-one: a wine, you'll say at the second glass, High Priest for the
+celebration of the uncommon nuptials between the body and the soul of
+man.'
+
+'You hit me rightly,'said Carting, tickled and touched; sensually excited
+by the bouquet of Victor Radnor's hospitality and companionship, which
+added flavour to Fenellan's compliments.  These came home to him through
+his desire to be the 'good spherical fellow'; for he, like modern
+diplomatists in the track of their eminent Berlinese New Type of the
+time, put on frankness as an armour over wariness, holding craft in
+reserve: his aim was at the refreshment of honest fellowship: by no means
+to discover that the coupling of his native bias with his professional
+duty was unprofitable nowadays.  Wariness, however, was not somnolent,
+even when he said: 'You know, I am never the lawyer out of my office.
+Man of the world to men of the world; and I have not lost by it. I am
+Mrs. Barman Radnor's legal adviser: you are Mr. Victor Radnor's friend.
+They are, as we see them, not on the best of terms.  I would rather--at
+its lowest, as a matter of business--be known for having helped them to
+some kind of footing than send in a round bill to my client--or another.
+I gain more in the end.  Frankly, I mean to prove, that it's a lawyer's
+interest to be human.'
+
+'Because, now, see!' said Fenellan, 'here's the case.  Miss Natalia
+Dreighton, of a good Yorkshire family--a large one, reads an
+advertisement for the post of companion to a lady, and answers it,
+and engages herself, previous to the appearance of the young husband.
+Miss Dreighton is one of the finest young women alive.  She has a
+glorious contralto voice.  Victor and she are encouraged by Mrs. Barman
+to sing duets together.  Well?
+
+Why, Euclid would have theorem'd it out for you at a glance at the trio.
+You have only to look on them, you chatter out your three Acts of a Drama
+without a stop.  If Mrs. Barman cares to practise charity, she has only
+to hold in her Fury-forked tongue, or her Jarniman I think 's the name.'
+
+Carting shrugged.
+
+'Let her keep from striking, if she's Christian,' pursued Fenetlan, 'and
+if kind let her resume the name of her first lord, who did a better thing
+for himself than for her, when he shook off his bars of bullion, to rise
+the lighter, and left a wretched female soul below, with the devil's own
+testimony to her attractions--thousands in the Funds, houses in the City.
+She threw the young couple together.  And my friend Victor Radnor is of a
+particularly inflammable nature.  Imagine one of us in such a situation,
+Mr. Carting!'
+
+'Trying!' said the lawyer.
+
+'The dear fellow was as nigh death as a man can be and know the sweetness
+of a woman's call to him to live.  And here's London's garden of pines,
+bananas, oranges; all the droppings of the Hesperides here!  We don't
+reflect on it, Mr. Carling.'
+
+'Not enough, not enough.'
+
+'I feel such a spout of platitudes that I could out With a Leading
+Article on a sheet of paper on your back while you're bending over the
+baskets.  I seem to have got circularly round again to Eden when I enter
+a garden.  Only, here we have to pay for the fruits we pluck.  Well, and
+just the same there; and no end to the payment either.  We're always
+paying!  By the way, Mrs. Victor Radnor's dinner-table's a spectacle.
+Her taste in flowers equals her lord's in wine.  But age improves the
+wine and spoils the flowers, you'll say.  Maybe you're for arguing that
+lovely women show us more of the flower than the grape, in relation to
+the course of time.  I pray you not to forget the terrible intoxicant
+she is.  We reconcile it, Mr. Carling, with the notion that the grape's
+her spirit, the flower her body.  Or is it the reverse?  Perhaps an
+intertwining.  But look upon bouquets and clusters, and the idea of
+woman springs up at once, proving she's composed of them.  I was about
+to remark, that with deference to the influence of Mrs. Burman's legal
+adviser, an impenitent or penitent sinner's pastor, the Reverend
+gentleman ministering to her spiritual needs, would presumptively
+exercise it, in this instance, in a superior degree.'
+
+Carling murmured: 'The Rev. Groseman Buttermore'; and did so for
+something of a cover, to continue a run of internal reflections: as, that
+he was assuredly listening to vinous talk in the streets by day; which
+impression placed him on a decorous platform above the amusing gentleman;
+to whom, however, he grew cordial, in recognizing consequently, that his
+exuberant flow could hardly be a mask; and that an indication here and
+there of a trap in his talk, must have been due rather to excess of
+wariness, habitual in the mind of a long-headed man, whose incorrigibly
+impulsive fits had necessarily to be rectified by a vigilant dexterity.
+
+'Buttermore!' ejaculated Fenellan: 'Groseman Buttermore!  Mrs. Victor's
+Father Confessor is the Rev. Septimus Barmby.  Groseman Buttermore--
+Septimus Barmby.  Is there anything in names?  Truly, unless these
+clerical gentlemen take them up at the crossing of the roads long
+after birth, the names would appear the active parts of them, and
+themselves mere marching supports, like the bearers of street placard-
+advertisements.  Now, I know a Septimus Barmby, and you a Groseman
+Buttermore, and beyond the fact that Reverend starts up before their
+names without mention, I wager it's about all we do know of them.
+They're Society's trusty rock-limpets, no doubt.'
+
+'My respect for the cloth is extreme.' Carling's short cough prepared the
+way for deductions.  'Between ourselves, they are men of the world.'
+
+Fenellan eyed benevolently the worthy attorney, whose innermost imp burst
+out periodically, like a Dutch clocksentry, to trot on his own small
+grounds for thinking himself of the community of the man of the world.
+'You lawyers dress in another closet,' he said.  'The Rev. Groseman has
+the ear of the lady?'
+
+'He has:--one ear.'
+
+'Ah?  She has the other open for a man of the world, perhaps.'
+
+'Listens to him, listens to me, listens to Jarniman; and we neither of
+us guide her.  She's very curious--a study.  You think you know her--next
+day she has eluded you.  She's emotional, she's hard; she's a woman,
+she's a stone.  Anything you like; but don't count on her.  And another
+thing--I'm bound to say it of myself,' Carling claimed close hearing of
+Fenellan over a shelf of saladstuff, 'no one who comes near her has any
+real weight with her in this matter.'
+
+'Probably you mix cream in your salad of the vinegar and oil,' said
+Fenellan.  'Try jelly of mutton.'--'You give me a new idea.  Latterly,
+fond as I am of salads, I've had rueful qualms.  We'll try it.'
+
+'You should dine with Victor Radnor.'
+
+'French cook, of course!'
+
+'Cordon bleu.'
+
+'I like to be sure of my cutlet.'
+
+'I like to be sure of a tastiness in my vegetables.'
+
+'And good sauces!'
+
+'And pretty pastry.  I said, Cordon bleu.  The miracle is, it 's a woman
+that Victor Radnor has trained: French, but a woman; devoted to him, as
+all who serve him are.  Do I say "but" a woman?  There's not a Frenchman
+alive to match her.  Vatel awaits her in Paradise with his arms extended;
+and may he wait long!'
+
+Carling indulged his passion for the genuine by letting a flutter of real
+envy be seen.  'My wife would like to meet such a Frenchwoman.  It must
+be a privilege to dine with him--to know him.  I know what he has done
+for English Commerce, and to build a colossal fortune: genius, as I said:
+and his donations to Institutions.  Odd, to read his name and Mrs. Burman
+Radnor's at separate places in the lists!  Well, we'll hope.  It's a case
+for a compromise of sentiments and claims.'
+
+'A friend of mine, spiced with cynic, declares that there's always an
+amicable way out of a dissension, if we get rid of Lupus and Vulpus.'
+
+Carling spied for a trap in the citation of Lupus and Vulpus; he saw
+none, and named the square of his residence on the great Russell
+property, and the number of the house, the hour of dinner next day.
+He then hung silent, breaking the pause with his hand out and a sharp
+'Well?' that rattled a whirligig sound in his head upward.  His leave of
+people was taken in this laughing falsetto, as of one affected by the
+curious end things come to.
+
+Fenellan thought of him for a moment or two, that he was a better than
+the common kind of lawyer; who doubtless knew as much of the wrong side
+of the world as lawyers do, and held his knowledge for the being a man of
+the world:--as all do, that have not Alpine heights in the mind to mount
+for a look out over their own and the world's pedestrian tracks.  I could
+spot the lawyer in your composition, my friend, to the exclusion of the
+man he mused.  But you're right in what you mean to say of yourself:
+you're a good fellow, for a lawyer, and together we may manage somehow
+to score a point of service to Victor Radnor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+SOME FAMILIAR GUESTS
+
+Nesta read her mother's face when Mrs. Victor entered the drawing-room to
+receive the guests.  She saw a smooth fair surface, of the kind as much
+required by her father's eyes as innocuous air by his nostrils: and it
+was honest skin, not the deceptive feminine veiling, to make a dear man
+happy over his volcano.  Mrs. Victor was to meet the friends with whom
+her feelings were at home, among whom her musical gifts gave her station:
+they liked her for herself; they helped her to feel at home with herself
+and be herself: a rarer condition with us all than is generally supposed.
+So she could determine to be cheerful in the anticipation of an evening
+that would at least be restful to the outworn sentinel nerve of her
+heart, which was perpetually alert and signalling to the great organ;
+often colouring the shows and seems of adverse things for an apeing of
+reality with too cruel a resemblance.  One of the scraps of practical
+wisdom gained by hardened sufferers is, to keep from spying at horizons
+when they drop into a pleasant dingle.  Such is the comfort of it, that
+we can dream, and lull our fears, and half think what we wish: and it is
+a heavenly truce with the fretful mind divided from our wishes.
+
+Nesta wondered at her mother's complacent questions concerning this
+Lakelands: the house, the county, the kind of people about, the features
+of the country.  Physically unable herself to be regretful under a burden
+three parts enrapturing her, the girl expected her mother to display a
+shadowy vexation, with a proud word or two, that would summon her
+thrilling sympathy in regard to the fourth part: namely, the aristocratic
+iciness of country magnates, who took them up and cast them off; as they
+had done, she thought, at Craye Farm and at Creckholt: she remembered it,
+of the latter place, wincingly, insurgently, having loved the dear home
+she had been expelled from by her pride of the frosty surrounding people
+--or no, not all, but some of them.  And what had roused their pride?
+
+Striking for a reason, her inexperience of our modern England,
+supplemented by readings in the England of a preceding generation,
+had hit on her father's profession of merchant.  It accounted to her
+for the behaviour of the haughty territorial and titled families.  But
+certain of the minor titles headed City Firms, she had heard; certain of
+the families were avowedly commercial.  'They follow suit,' her father
+said at Creckholt, after he had found her mother weeping, and decided
+instantly to quit and fly once more.  But if they followed suit in such
+a way, then Mr. Durance must be right when he called the social English
+the most sheepy of sheep:--and Nesta could not consent to the cruel
+verdict, she adored her compatriots.  Incongruities were pacified for
+her by the suggestion of her quick wits, that her father, besides being
+a merchant, was a successful speculator; and perhaps the speculator is
+not liked by merchants; or they were jealous of him; or they did not like
+his being both.
+
+She pardoned them with some tenderness, on a suspicion that a quaint old
+high-frilled bleached and puckered Puritanical rectitude (her thoughts
+rose in pictures) possibly condemned the speculator as a description of
+gambler.  An erratic severity in ethics is easily overlooked by the
+enthusiast for things old English.  She was consciously ahead of them
+in the knowledge that her father had been, without the taint of gambling,
+a beneficent speculator.  The Montgomery colony in South Africa, and his
+dealings with the natives in India, and his Railways in South America,
+his establishment of Insurance Offices, which were Savings Banks, and the
+Stores for the dispensing of sound goods to the poor, attested it.  O and
+he was hospitable, the kindest, helpfullest of friends, the dearest, the
+very brightest of parents: he was his girl's playmate.  She could be
+critic of him, for an induction to the loving of him more justly: yet if
+he had an excessive desire to win the esteem of people, as these keen
+young optics perceived in him, he strove to deserve it; and no one could
+accuse him of laying stress on the benefits he conferred.  Designedly,
+frigidly to wound a man so benevolent, appeared to her as an
+incomprehensible baseness.  The dropping of acquaintanceship with him,
+after the taste of its privileges, she ascribed, in the void of any
+better elucidation, to a mania of aristocratic conceit.  It drove her,
+despite her youthful contempt of politics, into a Radicalism that could
+find food in the epigrams of Mr. Colney Durance, even when they passed
+her understanding; or when he was not too distinctly seen by her to be
+shooting at all the parties of her beloved England, beneath the wicked
+semblance of shielding each by turns.
+
+The young gentleman introduced to the Radnor Concert-parties by Lady
+Grace Halley as the Hon. Dudley Sowerby, had to bear the sins of his
+class.  Though he was tall, straight-featured, correct in costume,
+appearance, deportment, second son of a religious earl and no scandal to
+the parentage, he was less noticed by Nesta than the elderly and the
+commoners.  Her father accused her of snubbing him.  She reproduced her
+famous copy of the sugared acid of Mr. Dudley Sowerby's closed mouth:
+a sort of sneer in meekness, as of humility under legitimate compulsion;
+deploring Christianly a pride of race that stamped it for this cowled
+exhibition: the wonderful mimicry was a flash thrown out by a born
+mistress of the art, and her mother was constrained to laugh, and so was
+her father; but he wilfully denied the likeness.  He charged her with
+encouraging Colney Durance to drag forth the sprig of nobility, in the
+nakedness of evicted shell-fish, on themes of the peril to England,
+possibly ruin, through the loss of that ruling initiative formerly
+possessed, in the days of our glory, by the titular nobles of the land.
+Colney spoke it effectively, and the Hon.  Dudley's expressive lineaments
+showed print of the heaving word Alas, as when a target is penetrated,
+centrally.  And he was not a particularly dull fellow 'for his class and
+country,' Colney admitted; adding: 'I hit his thought and out he came.'
+One has, reluctantly with Victor Radnor, to grant, that when a man's
+topmost unspoken thought is hit, he must be sharp on his guard to keep
+from coming out:--we have won a right to him.
+
+'Only, it's too bad; it 's a breach of hospitality,' Victor said, both
+to Nesta and to Nataly, alluding to several instances of Colney's ironic
+handling of their guests, especially of this one, whom Nesta would
+attack, and Nataly would not defend.
+
+They were alive at a signal to protect the others.  Miss Priscilla
+Graves, an eater of meat, was ridiculous in her ant'alcoholic
+exclusiveness and scorn: Mr. Pempton, a drinker of wine, would laud
+extravagantly the more transparent purity of vegetarianism.  Dr. Peter
+Yatt jeered at globules: Dr. John Cormyn mourned over human creatures
+treated as cattle by big doses.  The Rev. Septimus Barmby satisfactorily
+smoked: Mr. Peridon traced mortal evil to that act.  Dr. Schlesien had
+his German views, Colney Durance his ironic, Fenellan his fanciful and
+free-lance.  And here was an optimist, there a pessimist; and the rank
+Radical, the rigid Conservative, were not wanting.  All of them were
+pointedly opposed, extraordinarily for so small an assembly: absurdly,
+it might be thought: but these provoked a kind warm smile, with the
+exclamation: 'They are dears!'  They were the dearer for their fads
+and foibles.
+
+Music harmonized them.  Music, strangely, put the spell on Colney
+Durance, the sayer of bitter things, manufacturer of prickly balls,
+in the form of Discord's apples of whom Fenellan remarked, that he took
+to his music like an angry little boy to his barley-sugar, with a growl
+and a grunt.  All these diverse friends could meet and mix in Victor's
+Concert-room with an easy homely recognition of one another's musical
+qualities, at times enthusiastic; and their natural divergencies and
+occasional clashes added a salient tastiness to the group of whom Nesta
+could say: 'Mama, was there ever such a collection of dear good souls
+with such contrary minds?'  Her mother had the deepest of reasons for
+loving them, so as not to wish to see the slightest change in their
+minds, that the accustomed features making her nest of homeliness and
+real peace might be retained, with the humour of their funny silly
+antagonisms and the subsequent march in concord; excepting solely as
+regarded the perverseness of Priscilla Graves in her open contempt of Mr.
+Pempton's innocent two or three wine-glasses.  The vegetarian gentleman's
+politeness forbore to direct attention to the gobbets of meat Priscilla
+consumed, though he could express disapproval in general terms; but he
+entertained sentiments as warlike to the lady's habit of 'drinking the
+blood of animals.'  The mockery of it was, that Priscilla liked Mr.
+Pempton and admired his violoncello-playing, and he was unreserved in
+eulogy of her person and her pure soprano tones.  Nataly was a poetic
+match-maker.  Mr. Peridon was intended for Mademoiselle de Seilles,
+Nesta's young French governess; a lady of a courtly bearing, with placid
+speculation in the eyes she cast on a foreign people, and a voluble
+muteness shadowing at intervals along the line of her closed lips.
+
+The one person among them a little out of tune with most, was Lady Grace
+Halley.  Nataly's provincial gentlewoman's traditions of the manners
+indicating conduct, reproved unwonted licences assumed by Lady Grace;
+who, in allusion to Hymen's weaving of a cousinship between the earldom
+of Southweare and that of Cantor, of which Mr. Sowerby sprang, set her
+mouth and fan at work to delineate total distinctions, as it were from
+the egg to the empyrean.  Her stature was rather short, all of it
+conversational, at the eyebrows, the shoulders, the finger-tips, the
+twisting shape; a ballerina's expressiveness; and her tongue dashed half
+sentences through and among these hieroglyphs, loosely and funnily
+candid.  Anybody might hear that she had gone gambling into the City,
+and that she had got herself into a mess, and that by great good luck
+she had come across Victor Radnor, who, with two turns of the wrist,
+had plucked her out of the mire, the miraculous man!  And she had vowed
+to him, never again to run doing the like without his approval.
+
+The cause of her having done it, was related with the accompaniments;
+brows twitching, flitting smiles, shrugs, pouts, shifts of posture: she
+was married to a centaur; out of the saddle a man of wood, 'an excellent
+man.'  For the not colloquial do not commit themselves.  But one wants a
+little animation in a husband.  She called on bell-motion of the head to
+toll forth the utter nightcap negative.  He had not any: out of the
+saddle, he was asleep:--'next door to the Last Trump,' Colney Durance
+assisted her to describe the soundest of sleep in a husband, after wooing
+her to unbosom herself.  She was awake to his guileful arts, and sailed
+along with him, hailing his phrases, if he shot a good one; prankishly
+exposing a flexible nature, that took its holiday thus in a grinding
+world, among maskers, to the horrification of the prim.  So to refresh
+ourselves, by having publicly a hip-bath in the truth while we shock our
+hearers enough to be discredited for what we reveal, was a dexterous
+merry twist, amusing to her; but it was less a cynical malice than her
+nature that she indulged, 'A woman must have some excitement.'  The most
+innocent appeared to her the Stock Exchange.  The opinions of husbands
+who are not summoned to pay are hardly important; they vary.
+
+Colney helped her now and then to step the trifle beyond her stride,
+but if he was humorous, she forgave; and if together they appalled the
+decorous, it was great gain.  Her supple person, pretty lips, the style
+she had, gave a pass to the wondrous confidings, which were for masculine
+ears, whatever the sex.  Nataly might share in them, but women did not
+lead her to expansiveness; or not the women of the contracted class:
+Miss Graves, Mrs. Cormyn, and others at the Radnor Concerts.  She had a
+special consideration for Mademoiselle de Seilles, owing to her exquisite
+French, as she said; and she may have liked it, but it was the young
+Frenchwoman's air of high breeding that won her esteem.  Girls were
+spring frosts to her.  Fronting Nesta, she put on her noted smile, or
+wood-cut of a smile, with its label of indulgence; except when the girl
+sang.  Music she loved.  She said it was the saving of poor Dudley.  It
+distinguished him in the group of the noble Evangelical Cantor Family;
+and it gave him a subject of assured discourse in company; and oddly, it
+contributed to his comelier air.  Flute [This would be the German
+Blockeflute or our Recorder.  D.W.] in hand, his mouth at the blow-stop
+was relieved of its pained updraw by the form for puffing; he preserved a
+gentlemanly high figure in his exercises on the instrument, out of ken of
+all likeness to the urgent insistency of Victor Radnor's punctuating
+trunk of the puffing frame at almost every bar--an Apollo brilliancy in
+energetic pursuit of the nymph of sweet sound.  Too methodical one, too
+fiery the other.
+
+In duets of Hauptmann's, with Nesta at the piano, the contrast of dull
+smoothness and overstressed significance was very noticeable beside the
+fervent accuracy of her balanced fingering; and as she could also flute,
+she could criticize; though latterly, the flute was boxed away from lips
+that had devoted themselves wholly to song: song being one of the
+damsel's present pressing ambitions.  She found nothing to correct in Mr.
+Sowerby, and her father was open to all the censures; but her father
+could plead vitality, passion.  He held his performances cheap after the
+vehement display; he was a happy listener, whether to the babble of his
+'dear old Corelli,' or to the majesty of the rattling heavens and swaying
+forests of Beethoven.
+
+His air of listening was a thing to see; it had a look of disembodiment;
+the sparkle conjured up from deeps, and the life in the sparkle, as of a
+soul at holiday.  Eyes had been given this man to spy the pleasures and
+reveal the joy of his pasture on them: gateways to the sunny within,
+issues to all the outer Edens.  Few of us possess that double
+significance of the pure sparkle.  It captivated Lady Grace.  She said
+a word of it to Fenellan: 'There is a man who can feel rapture!'  He had
+not to follow the line of her sight: she said so on a previous evening,
+in a similar tone; and for a woman to repeat herself, using the very
+emphasis, was quaint.  She could feel rapture; but her features and limbs
+were in motion to designate it, between simply and wilfully; she had the
+instinct to be dimpling, and would not for a moment control it, and
+delighted in its effectiveness: only when observing that winged sparkle
+of eyes did an idea of envy, hardly a consciousness, inform her of being
+surpassed; and it might be in the capacity to feel besides the gift to
+express.  Such a reflection relating to a man, will make women mortally
+sensible that they are the feminine of him.
+
+'His girl has the look,' Fenellan said in answer.
+
+She cast a glance at Nesta, then at Nataly.
+
+And it was true, that the figure of a mother, not pretending to the
+father's vividness, eclipsed it somewhat in their child.  The mother gave
+richness of tones, hues and voice, and stature likewise, and the thick
+brown locks, which in her own were threads of gold along the brush from
+the temples: she gave the girl a certain degree of the composure of
+manner which Victor could not have bestowed; she gave nothing to clash
+with his genial temper; she might be supposed to have given various
+qualities, moral if you like.  But vividness was Lady Grace's admirable
+meteor of the hour: she was unable to perceive, so as to compute, the
+value of obscurer lights.  Under the charm of Nataly's rich contralto
+during a duet with Priscilla Graves, she gesticulated ecstasies, and
+uttered them, and genuinely; and still, when reduced to meditations,
+they would have had no weight, they would hardly have seemed an apology
+for language, beside Victor's gaze of pleasure in the noble forthroll of
+the notes.
+
+Nataly heard the invitation of the guests of the evening to Lakelands
+next day.
+
+Her anxieties were at once running about to gather provisions for the
+baskets.  She spoke of them at night.  But Victor had already put the
+matter in the hands of Madame Callet; and all that could be done, would
+be done by Armandine, he knew.  'If she can't muster enough at home,
+she'll be off to her Piccadilly shop by seven A.M. Count on plenty for
+twice the number.'
+
+Nataly was reposing on the thought that they were her friends, when
+Victor mentioned his having in the afternoon despatched a note to his
+relatives, the Duvidney ladies, inviting them to join him at the station
+to-morrow, for a visit of inspection to the house of his building on his
+new estate.  He startled her.  The Duvidney ladies were, to his
+knowledge, of the order of the fragile minds which hold together by
+the cement of a common trepidation for the support of things established,
+and have it not in them to be able to recognize the unsanctioned.  Good
+women, unworldly of the world, they were perforce harder than the world,
+from being narrower and more timorous.
+
+'But, Victor, you were sure they would refuse!'
+
+He answered: 'They may have gone back to Tunbridge Wells.  By the way,
+they have a society down there I want for Fredi.  Sure, do you say, my
+dear?  Perfectly sure.  But the accumulation of invitations and refusals
+in the end softens them, you will see.  We shall and must have them for
+Fredi.'
+
+She was used to the long reaches of his forecasts, his burning activity
+on a project; she found it idle to speak her thought, that his ingenuity
+would have been needless in a position dictated by plain prudence, and so
+much happier for them.
+
+They talked of Mrs. Burman until she had to lift a prayer to be saved
+from darker thoughts, dreadfully prolific, not to be faced.  Part of her
+prayer was on behalf of Mrs. Burman, for life to be extended to her, if
+the poor lady clung to life--if it was really humane to wish it for her:
+and heaven would know: heaven had mercy on the afflicted.
+
+Nataly heard the snuffle of hypocrisy in her prayer.  She had to cease to
+pray.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+AN INSPECTION OF LAKELANDS
+
+One may not have an intention to flourish, and may be pardoned for a
+semblance of it, in exclaiming, somewhat royally, as creator and owner
+of the place: 'There you see Lakelands.'
+
+The conveyances from the railway station drew up on a rise of road
+fronting an undulation, where our modern English architect's fantasia
+in crimson brick swept from central gables to flying wings, over pents,
+crooks, curves, peaks, cowled porches, balconies, recesses, projections,
+away to a red village of stables and dependent cottages; harmonious in
+irregularity; and coloured homely with the greensward about it, the pines
+beside it, the clouds above it.  Not many palaces would be reckoned as
+larger.  The folds and swells and stream of the building along the roll
+of ground, had an appearance of an enormous banner on the wind.  Nataly
+looked.  Her next look was at Colney Durance.  She sent the expected nods
+to Victor's carriage.  She would have given the whole prospect for the
+covering solitariness of her chamber.  A multitude of clashing
+sensations, and a throat-thickening hateful to her, compelled her to
+summon so as to force herself to feel a groundless anger, directed
+against none, against nothing, perfectly crazy, but her only resource
+for keeping down the great wave surgent at her eyes.
+
+Victor was like a swimmer in morning sea amid the exclamations encircling
+him.  He led through the straight passage of the galleried hall, offering
+two fair landscapes at front door and at back, down to the lake, Fredi's
+lake; a good oblong of water, notable in a district not abounding in the
+commodity.  He would have it a feature of the district; and it had been
+deepened and extended; up rose the springs, many ran the ducts.  Fredi's
+pretty little bathshed or bower had a space of marble on the three-feet
+shallow it overhung with a shade of carved woodwork; it had a diving-
+board for an eight-feet plunge; a punt and small row-boat of elegant
+build hard by.  Green ran the banks about, and a beechwood fringed with
+birches curtained the Northward length: morning sun and evening had a
+fair face of water to paint.  Saw man ever the like for pleasing a
+poetical damsel?  So was Miss Fredi, the coldest of the party hitherto,
+and dreaming a preference of 'old places' like Creckholt and Craye Farm,
+'captured to be enraptured,' quite according to man's ideal of his
+beneficence to the sex.  She pressed the hand of her young French
+governess, Louise de Seilles.  As in everything he did for his girl,
+Victor pointed boastfully to his forethought of her convenience and her
+tastes: the pine-panels of the interior, the shelves for her books, pegs
+to hang her favourite drawings, and the couch-bunk under a window to
+conceal the summerly recliner while throwing full light on her book; and
+the hearth-square for logs, when she wanted fire: because Fredi bathed in
+any weather: the oaken towel-coffer; the wood-carvings of doves, tits,
+fishes; the rod for the flowered silken hangings she was to choose, and
+have shy odalisque peeps of sunny water from her couch.
+
+'Fredi's Naiad retreat, when she wishes to escape Herr Strauscher or
+Signor Ruderi,' said Victor, having his grateful girl warm in an arm;
+'and if they head after her into the water, I back her to leave them
+puffing; she's a dolphin.  That water has three springs and gets all the
+drainage of the upland round us.  I chose the place chiefly on account of
+it and the pines.  I do love pines!'
+
+'But, excellent man! what do you not love?' said Lady Grace, with the
+timely hit upon the obvious, which rings.
+
+'It saves him from accumulation of tissue,' said Colney.
+
+'What does?' was eagerly asked by the wife of the homoeopathic Dr. John
+Cormyn, a sentimental lady beset with fears of stoutness.
+
+Victor cried: 'Tush; don't listen to Colney, pray.'
+
+But she heard Colney speak of a positive remedy; more immediately
+effective than an abjuration of potatoes and sugar.  She was obliged by
+her malady to listen, although detesting the irreverent ruthless man, who
+could direct expanding frames, in a serious tone, to love; love
+everybody, everything; violently and universally love; and so without
+intermission pay out the fat created by a rapid assimilation of
+nutriment.  Obeseness is the most sensitive of our ailments: probably as
+being aware, that its legitimate appeal to pathos is ever smothered in
+its pudding-bed of the grotesque.  She was pained, and showed it, and was
+ashamed of herself for showing it; and that very nearly fetched the tear.
+
+'Our host is an instance in proof,' Colney said.  He waved hand at the
+house.  His meaning was hidden; evidently he wanted victims.  Sight of
+Lakelands had gripped him with the fell satiric itch; and it is a passion
+to sting and tear, on rational grounds.  His face meanwhile, which had
+points of the handsome, signified a smile asleep, as if beneath a cloth.
+Only those who knew him well were aware of the claw-like alertness under
+the droop of eyelids.
+
+Admiration was the common note, in the various keys.  The station
+selected for the South-eastward aspect of the dark-red gabled pile on
+its white shell-terrace, backed by a plantation of tall pines, a mounded
+and full-plumed company, above the left wing, was admired, in files and
+in volleys.  Marvellous, effectively miraculous, was the tale of the vow
+to have the great edifice finished within one year: and the strike of
+workmen, and the friendly colloquy with them, the good reasoning, the
+unanimous return to duty; and the doubling, the trebling of the number
+of them; and the most glorious of sights-0the grand old English working
+with a will! as Englishmen do when they come at last to heat; and they
+conquer, there is then nothing that they cannot conquer.  So the
+conqueror said.--And admirable were the conservatories running three long
+lines, one from the drawing-room, to a central dome for tropical growths.
+And the parterres were admired; also the newly-planted Irish junipers
+bounding the West-walk; and the three tiers of stately descent from the
+three green terrace banks to the grassy slopes over the lake.  Again the
+lake was admired, the house admired.  Admiration was evoked for great
+orchid-houses 'over yonder,' soon to be set up.
+
+Off we go to the kitchen-garden.  There the admiration is genial,
+practical.  We admire the extent of the beds marked out for asparagus,
+and the French disposition of the planting at wide intervals; and the
+French system of training peach, pear, and plum trees on the walls to win
+length and catch sun, we much admire.  We admire the gardener.  We are
+induced temporarily to admire the French people.  They are sagacious in
+fruit-gardens.  They have not the English Constitution, you think
+rightly; but in fruit-gardens they grow for fruit, and not, as Victor
+quotes a friend, for wood, which the valiant English achieve.  We hear
+and we see examples of sagacity; and we are further brought round to the
+old confession, that we cannot cook; Colney Durance has us there; we have
+not studied herbs and savours; and so we are shocked backward step by
+step until we retreat precipitately into the nooks where waxen tapers,
+carefully tended by writers on the Press, light-up mysterious images of
+our national selves for admiration.  Something surely we do, or we should
+not be where we are.  But what is it we do (excepting cricket, of course)
+which others cannot do?  Colney asks; and he excludes cricket and
+football.
+
+An acutely satiric man in an English circle, that does not resort to the
+fist for a reply to him, may almost satiate the excessive fury roused in
+his mind by an illogical people of a provocative prosperity, mainly
+tongueless or of leaden tongue above the pressure of their necessities,
+as he takes them to be.  They give him so many opportunities.  They are
+angry and helpless as the log hissing to the saw.  Their instinct to make
+use of the downright in retort, restrained as it is by a buttoned coat of
+civilization, is amusing, inviting.  Colney Durance allured them to the
+quag's edge and plunged them in it, to writhe patriotically; and although
+it may be said, that they felt their situation less than did he the venom
+they sprang in his blood, he was cruel; he caused discomfort.  But these
+good friends about him stood for the country, an illogical country; and
+as he could not well attack his host Victor Radnor, an irrational man,
+he selected the abstract entity for the discharge of his honest spite.
+
+The irrational friend was deeper at the source of his irritation than the
+illogical old motherland.  This house of Lakelands, the senselessness of
+his friend in building it and designing to live in it, after experiences
+of an incapacity to stand in a serene contention with the world he
+challenged, excited Colney's wasp.  He was punished, half way to frenzy
+behind his placable demeanour, by having Dr. Schlesien for chorus.  And
+here again, it was the unbefitting, not the person, which stirred his
+wrath.  A German on English soil should remember the dues of a guest.
+At the same time, Colney said things to snare the acclamation of an
+observant gentleman of that race, who is no longer in his first
+enthusiasm for English beef and the complexion of the women.  'Ah, ya,
+it is true, what you say: "The English grow as fast as odders, but they
+grow to corns instead of brains."  They are Bull.  Quaat true.'  He
+bellowed on a laugh the last half of the quotation.
+
+Colney marked him.  His encounters with Fenellan were enlivening
+engagements and left no malice; only a regret, when the fencing passed
+his guard, that Fenellan should prefer to flash for the minute.  He would
+have met a pert defender of England, in the person of Miss Priscilla
+Graves, if she had not been occupied with observation of the bearing of
+Lady Grace Halley toward Mr. Victor Radnor; which displeased her on
+behalf of Mrs. Victor; she was besides hostile by race and class to
+an aristocratic assumption of licence.  Sparing Colney, she with some
+scorn condemned Mr. Pempton for allowing his country to be ridiculed
+without a word.  Mr. Pempton believed that the Vegetarian movement was
+more progressive in England than in other lands, but he was at the
+disadvantage with the fair Priscilla, that eulogy of his compatriots
+on this account would win her coldest approval.  'Satire was never an
+argument,' he said, too evasively.
+
+The Rev. Septimus Barmby received the meed of her smile, for saying in
+his many-fathom bass, with an eye on Victor: 'At least we may boast of
+breeding men, who are leaders of men.'
+
+The announcement of luncheon, by Victor's butler Arlington, opportunely
+followed and freighted the remark with a happy recognition of that which
+comes to us from the hands of conquerors.  Dr. Schlesien himself, no
+antagonist to England, but like Colney Durance, a critic, speculated in
+view of the spread of pic-nic provision beneath the great glass dome, as
+to whether it might be, that these English were on another start out of
+the dust in vigorous commercial enterprise, under leadership of one of
+their chance masterly minds-merchant, in this instance: and be debated
+within, whether Genius, occasionally developed in a surprising superior
+manner by these haphazard English, may not sometimes wrest the prize from
+Method; albeit we count for the long run, that Method has assurance of
+success, however late in the race to set forth.
+
+Luncheon was a merry meal, with Victor and Nataly for host and hostess;
+Fenellan, Colney Durance, and Lady Grace Halley for the talkers.  A gusty
+bosom of sleet overhung the dome, rattled on it, and rolling Westward,
+became a radiant mountain-land, partly worthy of Victor's phrase: 'A
+range of Swiss Alps in air.'
+
+'With periwigs Louis Quatorze for peaks,' Colney added.
+
+And Fenellan improved on him: 'Or a magnified Bench of Judges at the
+trial of your caerulean Phryne.'
+
+The strip of white cloud flew on a whirl from the blue, to confirm it.
+
+But Victor and Lady Grace rejected any play of conceits upon nature.
+Violent and horrid interventions of the counterfeit, such mad similes
+appeared to them, when pure coin was offered.  They loathed the Rev.
+Septimus Barmby for proclaiming, that he had seen 'Chapters of Hebrew
+History in the grouping of clouds.'
+
+His gaze was any one of the Chapters upon Nesta.  The clerical
+gentleman's voice was of a depth to claim for it the profoundest which
+can be thought or uttered; and Nesta's tender youth had taken so strong
+an impression of sacredness from what Fenellan called 'his chafer tones,'
+that her looks were often given him in gratitude, for the mere sound.
+Nataly also had her sense of safety in acquiescing to such a voice coming
+from such a garb.  Consequently, whenever Fenellan and Colney were at
+him, drawing him this way and that for utterances cathedral in sentiment
+and sonorousness, these ladies shed protecting beams; insomuch that he
+was inspired to the agreeable conceptions whereof frequently rash
+projects are an issue.
+
+Touching the neighbours of Lakelands, they were principally enriched
+merchants, it appeared; a snippet or two of the fringe of aristocracy lay
+here and there among them; and one racy-of-the-soil old son of Thames,
+having the manners proper to last century's yeoman.  Mr. Pempton knew
+something of this quaint Squire of Hefferstone, Beaves Urmsing by name;
+a ruddy man, right heartily Saxon; a still glowing brand amid the ashes
+of the Heptarchy hearthstone; who had a song, The Marigolds, which he
+would troll out for you anywhere, on any occasion.  To have so near to
+the metropolis one from the centre of the venerable rotundity of the
+country, was rare.  Victor exclaimed 'Come!' in ravishment over the
+picturesqueness of a neighbour carrying imagination away to the founts
+of England; and his look at Nataly proposed.  Her countenance was
+inapprehensive.  He perceived resistance, and said: 'I have met two or
+three of them in the train: agreeable men: Gladding, the banker;
+a General Fanning; that man Blathenoy, great billbroker.  But the fact
+is, close on London, we're independent of neighbours; we mean to be.
+Lakelands and London practically join.'
+
+'The mother city becoming the suburb,' murmured Colney, in report of the
+union.
+
+'You must expect to be invaded, sir,' said Mr. Sowerby; and Victor
+shrugged: 'We are pretty safe.'
+
+'The lock of a door seems a potent security until some one outside is
+heard fingering the handle nigh midnight,' Fenellan threw out his airy
+nothing of a remark.
+
+It struck on Nataly's heart.  'So you will not let us be lonely here,'
+she said to her guests.
+
+The Rev. Septimus Barmby was mouthpiece for congregations.  Sound of a
+subterranean roar, with a blast at the orifice, informed her of their
+'very deep happiness in the privilege.'
+
+He comforted her.  Nesta smiled on him thankfully.
+
+'Don't imagine, Mrs. Victor, that you can be shut off from neighbours,
+in a house like this; and they have a claim,' said Lady Grace, quitting
+the table.
+
+Fenellan and Colney thought so:
+
+'Like mice at a cupboard.'
+
+'Beetles in a kitchen.'
+
+'No, no-no, no !' Victor shook head, pitiful over the good people likened
+to things unclean, and royally upraising them: in doing which, he
+scattered to vapour the leaden incubi they had been upon his flatter
+moods of late.  'No, but it's a rapture to breathe the air here!'  His
+lifted chest and nostrils were for the encouragement of Nataly to soar
+beside him.
+
+She summoned her smile and nodded.
+
+He spoke aside to Lady Grace: 'The dear soul wants time to compose
+herself after a grand surprise.'
+
+She replied: 'I think I could soon be reconciled.  How much land?'
+
+'In treaty for some hundred and eighty or ninety acres .  .  .  in all
+at present three hundred and seventy, including plantations, lake,
+outhouses.'
+
+'Large enough; land paying as it does--that is, not paying.  We shall be
+having to gamble in the City systematically for subsistence.'
+
+'You will not so much as jest on the subject.'
+
+Coming from such a man, that was clear sky thunder.  The lady played
+it off in a shadowy pout and shrug while taking a stamp of his
+masterfulness, not so volatile.
+
+She said to Nataly: 'Our place in Worcestershire is about half the size,
+if as much.  Large enough when we're not crowded out with gout and can
+open to no one.  Some day you will visit us, I hope.'
+
+'You we count on here, Lady Grace.'
+
+It was an over-accentuated response; unusual with this well-bred woman;
+and a bit of speech that does not flow, causes us to speculate.  The lady
+resumed: 'I value the favour.  We're in a horsey-doggy-foxy circle down
+there.  We want enlivening.  If we had your set of musicians and
+talkers!'
+
+Nataly smiled in vacuous kindness, at a loss for the retort of a
+compliment to a person she measured.  Lady Grace also was an amiable
+hostile reviewer.  Each could see, to have cited in the other, defects
+common to the lower species of the race, admitting a superior personal
+quality or two; which might be pleaded in extenuation; and if the apology
+proved too effective, could be dispersed by insistence upon it, under an
+implied appeal to benevolence.  When we have not a liking for the
+creature whom we have no plain cause to dislike, we are minutely just.
+
+During the admiratory stroll along the ground-floor rooms, Colney
+Durance found himself beside Dr. Schlesien; the latter smoking, striding,
+emphasizing, but bearable, as the one of the party who was not
+perpetually at the gape in laudation.  Colney was heard to say: 'No
+doubt: the German is the race the least mixed in Europe: it might
+challenge aboriginals for that.  Oddly, it has invented the Cyclopaedia
+for knowledge, the sausage for nutrition!  How would you explain it?'
+
+Dr. Schlesien replied with an Atlas shrug under fleabite to the
+insensately infantile interrogation.
+
+He in turn was presently heard.
+
+'But, my good sir! you quote me your English Latin.  I must beg of you
+you write it down.  It is orally incomprehensible to Continentals.'
+
+'We are Islanders!' Colney shrugged in languishment.
+
+'Oh, you do great things .  .  .'  Dr. Schlesien rejoined in kindness,
+making his voice a musical intimation of the smallness of the things.
+
+'We build great houses, to employ our bricks'
+
+'No, Colney, to live in,' said Victor.
+
+'Scarcely long enough to warm them.'
+
+'What do you .  .  .  fiddle!'
+
+'They are not Hohenzollerns !'
+
+'It is true,' Dr. Schlesien called.  'No, but you learn discipline; you
+build.  I say wid you, not Hohenzollerns you build!  But you shall look
+above: Eyes up.  Ire necesse est.  Good, but mount; you come to
+something.  Have ideas.'
+
+'Good, but when do we reach your level?'
+
+'Sir, I do not say more than that we do not want instruction from
+foreigners.'
+
+'Pupil to paedagogue indeed.  You have the wreath in Music, in
+Jurisprudence, Chemistry, Scholarship, Beer, Arms, Manners.'
+
+Dr. Schlesien puffed a tempest of tobacco and strode.
+
+'He is chiselling for wit in the Teutonic block,' Colney said, falling
+back to Fenellan.
+
+Fenellan observed: 'You might have credited him with the finished
+sculpture.'
+
+'They're ahead of us in sticking at the charge of wit.'
+
+'They've a widening of their swallow since Versailles.'
+
+'Manners?'
+
+'Well, that's a tight cravat for the Teutonic thrapple!  But he's off by
+himself to loosen it.'
+
+Victor came on the couple testily.  'What are you two concocting!
+I say, do keep the peace, please.  An excellent good fellow; better up
+in politics than any man I know; understands music; means well, you can
+see.  You two hate a man at all serious.  And he doesn't bore with his
+knowledge.  A scholar too.'
+
+'If he'll bring us the atmosphere of the groves of Academe, he may swing
+his ferule pickled in himself, and welcome,' said Fenellan.
+
+'Yes!' Victor nodded at a recognized antagonism in Fenellan; 'but
+Colney's always lifting the Germans high above us.'
+
+'It's to exercise his muscles.'
+
+Victor headed to the other apartments, thinking that the Rev. Septimus
+and young Sowerby, Old England herself, were spared by the diversion of
+these light skirmishing shots from their accustomed victims to the
+'masculine people of our time.  His friends would want a drilling to be
+of aid to him in his campaign to come.  For it was one, and a great one.
+He remembered his complete perception of the plan, all the elements of
+it, the forward whirling of it, just before the fall on London Bridge.
+The greatness of his enterprise laid such hold of him that the smallest
+of obstacles had a villanous aspect; and when, as anticipated, Colney and
+Fenellan were sultry flies for whomsoever they could fret, he was blind
+to the reading of absurdities which caused Fredi's eyes to stream and
+Lady Grace beside him to stand awhile and laugh out her fit.  Young
+Sowerby appeared forgiving enough--he was a perfect gentleman: but
+Fredi's appalling sense of fun must try him hard.  And those young
+fellows are often more wounded by a girl's thoughtless laughter than
+by a man's contempt.  Nataly should have protected him.  Her face had
+the air of a smiling general satisfaction; sign of a pleasure below the
+mark required; sign too of a sleepy partner for a battle.  Even in the
+wonderful kitchen, arched and pillared (where the explanation came to
+Nesta of Madame Callet's frequent leave of absence of late, when an
+inferior dinner troubled her father in no degree), even there his Nataly
+listened to the transports of the guests with benign indulgence.
+
+'Mama!' said Nesta, ready to be entranced by kitchens in her bubbling
+animation: she meant the recalling of instances of the conspirator her
+father had been.
+
+'You none of you guessed Armandine's business!' Victor cried, in a glee
+that pushed to make the utmost of this matter and count against chagrin.
+'She was off to Paris; went to test the last inventions:--French brains
+are always alert:--and in fact, those kitchen-ranges, gas and coal, and
+the apparatus for warming plates and dishes, the whole of the battery is
+on the model of the Duc d'Ariane's--finest in Europe.  Well,' he agreed
+with Colney, 'to say France is enough.'
+
+Mr. Pempton spoke to Miss Graves of the task for a woman to conduct a
+command so extensive.  And, as when an inoffensive wayfarer has chanced
+to set foot near a wasp's nest, out on him came woman and her champions,
+the worthy and the sham, like a blast of powder.
+
+Victor ejaculated: 'Armandine !'  Whoever doubted her capacity, knew not
+Armandine; or not knowing Armandine, knew not the capacity in women.
+
+With that utterance of her name, he saw the orangey spot on London
+Bridge, and the sinking Tower and masts and funnels, and the rising of
+them, on his return to his legs; he recollected, that at the very edge of
+the fall he had Armandine strongly in his mind.  She was to do her part:
+Fenellan and Colney on the surface, she below: and hospitality was to do
+its part, and music was impressed--the innocent Concerts; his wealth, all
+his inventiveness were to serve;--and merely to attract and win the
+tastes of people, for a social support to Lakelands!  Merely that?  Much
+more:--if Nataly's coldness to the place would but allow him to form an
+estimate of how much.  At the same time, being in the grasp of his
+present disappointment, he perceived a meanness in the result, that was
+astonishing and afflicting.  He had not ever previously felt imagination
+starving at the vision of success.  Victor had yet to learn, that the man
+with a material object in aim, is the man of his object; and the nearer
+to his mark, often the farther is he from a sober self; he is more the
+arrow of his bow than bow to his arrow.  This we pay for scheming: and
+success is costly; we find we have pledged the better half of ourselves
+to clutch it; not to be redeemed with the whole handful of our prize!
+He was, however, learning after his leaping fashion.  Nataly's defective
+sympathy made him look at things through the feelings she depressed.
+A shadow of his missed Idea on London Bridge seemed to cross him from the
+close flapping of a wing within reach.  He could say only, that it would,
+if caught, have been an answer to the thought disturbing him.
+
+Nataly drew Colney Durance with her eyes to step beside her, on the
+descent to the terrace.  Little Skepsey hove in sight, coming swift as
+the point of an outrigger over the flood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+SKEPSEY IN MOTION
+
+The bearer of his master's midday letters from London shot beyond Nataly
+as soon as seen, with an apparent snap of his body in passing.  He
+steamed to the end of the terrace and delivered the packet, returning at
+the same rate of speed, to do proper homage to the lady he so much
+respected.  He had left the railway-station on foot instead of taking a
+fly, because of a calculation that he would save three minutes; which he
+had not lost for having to come through the raincloud.  'Perhaps the
+contrary,' Skepsey said: it might be judged to have accelerated his
+course: and his hat dripped, and his coat shone, and he soaped his hands,
+cheerful as an ouzel-cock when the sun is out again.
+
+'Many cracked crowns lately, in the Manly Art?' Colney inquired of him.
+And Skepsey answered with precision of statement: 'Crowns, no, sir; the
+nose, it may happen; but it cannot be said to be the rule.'
+
+'You are of opinion, that the practice of Scientific Pugilism offers us
+compensation for the broken bridge of a nose?'
+
+'In an increase of manly self-esteem: I do, sir, yes.'
+
+Skepsey was shy of this gentleman's bite; and he fancied his defence had
+been correct.  Perceiving a crumple of the lips of Mr. Durance, he took
+the attitude of a watchful dubiety.
+
+'But, my goodness, you are wet through!' cried Nataly, reproaching
+herself for the tardy compassion; and Nesta ran up to them and heaped a
+thousand pities on her 'poor dear Skip,' and drove him in beneath the
+glass-dome to the fragments of pic-nic, and poured champagne for him,
+'lest his wife should have to doctor him for a cold,' and poured afresh,
+when he had obeyed her: 'for the toasting of Lakelands, dear Skepsey !'
+impossible to resist: so he drank, and blinked; and was then told, that
+before using his knife and fork he must betake himself to some fire of
+shavings and chips, where coffee was being made, for the purpose of
+drying his clothes.  But this he would not hear of: he was pledged to
+business, to convey his master's letters, and he might have to catch a
+train by the last quarter-minute, unless it was behind the time-tables;
+he must hold himself ready to start.  Entreated, adjured, commanded,
+Skepsey commiseratingly observed to Colney Durance, 'The ladies do not
+understand, sir!'  For Turk of Constantinople had never a more haremed
+opinion of the unfitness of women in the brave world of action.  The
+persistence of these ladies endeavouring to obstruct him in the course of
+his duty, must have succeeded save that for one word of theirs he had
+two, and twice the promptitude of motion.  He explained to them, as to
+good children, that the loss of five minutes might be the loss of a Post,
+the loss of thousands of pounds, the loss of the character of a Firm;
+and he was away to the terrace.  Nesta headed him and waved him back.
+She and her mother rebuked him: they called him unreasonable; wherein
+they resembled the chief example of the sex to him, in a wife he had at
+home, who levelled that charge against her husband when most she needed
+discipline: the woman laid hand on the very word legitimately his own
+for the justification of his process with her.
+
+'But, Skips! if you are ill and we have to nurse you!' said Nesta.
+
+She forgot the hospital, he told her cordially, and laughed at the notion
+of a ducking producing a cold or a cold a fever, or anything consumption,
+with him.  So the ladies had to keep down their anxious minds and allow
+him to stand in wet clothing to eat his cold pie and salad.
+
+Miss Priscilla Graves entering to them, became a witness that they were
+seductresses for inducing him to drink wine--and a sparkling wine.
+
+'It is to warm him,' they pleaded; and she said: 'He must be warm from
+his walk'; and they said: 'But he is wet'; and said she, without a show
+of feeling: 'Warm water, then'; and Skepsey writhed, as if in the grasp
+of anatomists, at being the subject of female contention or humane
+consideration.  Miss Graves caught signs of the possible proselyte in
+him; she remarked encouragingly:
+
+'I am sure he does not like it; he still has a natural taste.'
+
+She distressed his native politeness, for the glass was in his hand, and
+he was fully aware of her high-principled aversion; and he profoundly
+bowed to principles, believing his England to be pillared on them; and
+the lady looked like one who bore the standard of a principle; and if we
+slap and pinch and starve our appetites, the idea of a principle seems
+entering us to support.  Subscribing to a principle, our energies are
+refreshed; we have a faith in the country that was not with us before the
+act; and of a real well-founded faith come the glowing thoughts which we
+have at times: thoughts of England heading the nations; when the smell of
+an English lane under showers challenges Eden, and the threading of a
+London crowd tunes discords to the swell of a cathedral organ.  It may
+be, that by the renunciation of any description of alcohol, a man will
+stand clearer-headed to serve his country.  He may expect to have a
+clearer memory, for certain: he will not be asking himself, unable to
+decide, whether his master named a Mr. Journeyman or a Mr. Jarniman, as
+the person he declined to receive.  Either of the two is repulsed upon
+his application, owing to the guilty similarity of sounds but what we are
+to think of is, our own sad state of inefficiency in failing to remember;
+which accuses our physical condition, therefore our habits.--Thus the
+little man debated, scarcely requiring more than to hear the right word,
+to be a convert and make him a garland of the proselyte's fetters.
+
+Destructively for the cause she advocated, Miss Priscilla gestured the
+putting forth of an abjuring hand, with the recommendation to him, so to
+put aside temptation that instant; and she signified in a very ugly jerk
+of her features, the vilely filthy stuff Morality thought it, however
+pleasing it might be to a palate corrupted by indulgence of the sensual
+appetites.
+
+But the glass had been handed to him by the lady he respected, who looked
+angelical in offering it, divinely other than ugly; and to her he could
+not be discourteous; not even to pay his homage to the representative of
+a principle.  He bowed to Miss Graves, and drank, and rushed forth;
+hearing shouts behind him.
+
+His master had a packet of papers ready, easy for the pocket.
+
+'By the way, Skepsey,' he said, 'if a man named Jarniman should call at
+the office, I will see him.'
+
+Skepsey's grey eyes came out.
+
+Or was it Journeyman, that his master would not see; and Jarniman that he
+would?
+
+His habit of obedience, pride of apprehension, and the time to catch the
+train, forbade inquiry.  Besides he knew of himself of old, that his
+puzzles were best unriddled running.
+
+The quick of pace are soon in the quick of thoughts.
+
+Jarniman, then, was a man whom his master, not wanting to see, one day,
+and wanting to see, on another day, might wish to conciliate: a case of
+policy.  Let Jarniman go.  Journeyman, on the other hand, was nobody at
+all, a ghost of the fancy.  Yet this Journeyman was as important an
+individual, he was a dread reality; more important to Skepsey in the
+light of patriot: and only in that light was he permitted of a scrupulous
+conscience and modest mind to think upon himself when the immediate
+subject was his master's interests.  For this Journeyman had not an
+excuse for existence in Mr. Radnor's pronunciation: he was born of the
+buzz of a troubled ear, coming of a disordered brain, consequent
+necessarily upon a disorderly stomach, that might protest a degree of
+comparative innocence, but would be shamed utterly under inspection of
+the eye of a lady of principle.
+
+What, then, was the value to his country of a servant who could not
+accurately recollect his master's words!  Miss Graves within him asked
+the rapid little man, whether indeed his ideas were his own after
+draughts of champagne.
+
+The ideas, excited to an urgent animation by his racing trot, were a
+quiverful in flight over an England terrible to the foe and dancing on
+the green.  Right so: but would we keep up the dance, we must be red iron
+to touch: and the fighter for conquering is the one who can last and has
+the open brain;--and there you have a point against alcohol.  Yes, and
+Miss Graves, if she would press it, with her natural face, could be
+pleasant and persuasive: and she ought to be told she ought to marry, for
+the good of the country.  Women taking liquor: Skepsey had a vision of
+his wife with rheumy peepers and miauly mouth, as he had once beheld the
+creature:--Oh! they need discipline not such would we have for the
+mothers of our English young.  Decidedly the women of principle are bound
+to enter wedlock; they should be bound by law.  Whereas, in the opposing
+case--the binding of the unprincipled to a celibate state--such a law
+would have saved Skepsey from the necessitated commission of deeds of
+discipline with one of the female sex, and have rescued his progeny from
+a likeness to the corn-stalk reverting to weed.  He had but a son for
+England's defence; and the frame of his boy might be set quaking by a
+thump on the wind of a drum; the courage of William Barlow Skepsey would
+not stand against a sheep; it would wind-up hares to have a run at him
+out in the field.  Offspring of a woman of principle!  .  .  .  but there
+is no rubbing out in life: why dream of it?  Only that one would not have
+one's country the loser!
+
+Dwell a moment on the reverse--and first remember the lesson of the
+Captivity of the Jews and the outcry of their backsliding and
+repentance:--see a nation of the honourably begotten; muscular men
+disdaining the luxuries they will occasionally condescend to taste,
+like some tribe in Greece; boxers, rowers, runners, climbers; braced,
+indomitable; magnanimous, as only the strong can be; an army at word,
+winning at a stroke the double battle of the hand and the heart: men who
+can walk the paths through the garden of the pleasures.  They receive
+fitting mates, of a build to promise or aid in ensuring depth of chest
+and long reach of arm for their progeny.
+
+Down goes the world before them.
+
+And we see how much would be due for this to a corps of ladies like Miss
+Graves, not allowed to remain too long on the stalk of spinsterhood.  Her
+age might count twenty-eight: too long!  She should be taught that men
+can, though truly ordinary women cannot, walk these orderly paths through
+the garden.  An admission to women, hinting restrictions, on a ticket
+marked 'in moderation' (meaning, that they may pluck a flower or fruit
+along the pathway border to which they are confined), speedily, alas,
+exhibits them at a mad scramble across the pleasure-beds.  They know not
+moderation.  Neither for their own sakes nor for the sakes of Posterity
+will they hold from excess, when they are not pledged to shun it.
+
+The reason is, that their minds cannot conceive the abstract, as men do.
+
+But there are grounds for supposing that the example before them of a sex
+exercising self-control in freedom, would induce women to pledge
+themselves to a similar abnegation, until they gain some sense of touch
+upon the impalpable duty to the generations coming after us thanks to the
+voluntary example we set them.
+
+The stupendous task, which had hitherto baffled Skepsey in the course of
+conversational remonstrances with his wife;--that of getting the Idea of
+Posterity into the understanding of its principal agent, might then be
+mastered.
+
+Therefore clearly men have to begin the salutary movement: it manifestly
+devolves upon them.  Let them at once take to rigorous physical training.
+Women under compulsion, as vessels: men in their magnanimity,
+patriotically, voluntarily.
+
+Miss Graves must have had an intimation for him; he guessed it; and it
+plunged him into a conflict with her, that did not suffer him to escape
+without ruefully feeling the feebleness of his vocabulary: and
+consequently he made a reluctant appeal to figures, and it hung upon
+the bolder exhibition of lists and tables as to whether he was beaten;
+and if beaten, he was morally her captive; and this being the case,
+nothing could be more repulsive to Skepsey; seeing that he, unable of
+his nature passively or partially to undertake a line of conduct, beheld
+himself wearing a detestable 'ribbon,' for sign of an oath quite
+needlessly sworn (simply to satisfy the lady overcoming him with nimbler
+tongue), and blocking the streets, marching in bands beneath banners,
+howling hymns.
+
+Statistics, upon which his master and friends, after exchanging opinions
+in argument, always fell back, frightened him.  As long as they had
+no opponents of their own kind, they swept the field, they were
+intelligible, as the word 'principle' had become.  But the appearance
+of one body of Statistics invariably brought up another; and the strokes
+and counterstrokes were like a play of quarter-staff on the sconce,
+to knock all comprehension out of Skepsey.  Otherwise he would not
+unwillingly have inquired to-morrow into the Statistics of the
+controversy between the waters of the wells and of the casks, prepared
+to walk over to the victorious, however objectionable that proceeding.
+He hoped to question his master some day except that his master would
+very naturally have a tendency to sum-up in favour of wine--good wine,
+in moderation; just as Miss Graves for the cup of tea--not so
+thoughtfully stipulating that it should be good and not too copious.
+Statistics are according to their conjurors; they are not independent
+bodies, with native colours; they needs must be painted by the different
+hands they pass through, and they may be multiplied; a nought or so
+counts for nothing with the teller.  Skepsey saw that.  Yet they can
+overcome: even as fictitious battalions, they can overcome.  He shrank
+from the results of a ciphering match having him for object, and was
+ashamed of feeling to Statistics as women to giants; nevertheless he
+acknowledged that the badge was upon him, if Miss Graves should beat her
+master in her array of figures, to insist on his wearing it, as she
+would, she certainly would.  And against his internal conviction perhaps;
+with the knowledge that the figures were an unfortified display, and his
+oath of bondage an unmanly servility, the silliest of ceremonies!  He was
+shockingly feminine to Statistics.
+
+Mr. Durance despised them: he called them, arguing against Mr. Radnor,
+'those emotional things,' not comprehensibly to Skepsey.  But Mr.
+Durance, a very clever gentleman, could not be right in everything.  He
+made strange remarks upon his country.  Dr. Yatt attributed them to the
+state of 'his digestion.
+
+And Mr. Fenellan had said of Mr. Durance that, as 'a barrister wanting
+briefs, the speech in him had been bottled too long and was an overripe
+wine dripping sour drops through the rotten cork.'  Mr. Fenellan said it
+laughing, he meant no harm.  Skepsey was sure he had the words.  He heard
+no more than other people hear; he remembered whole sentences, and many:
+on one of his runs, this active little machine, quickened by motion to
+fire, revived the audible of years back; whatever suited his turn of mind
+at the moment rushed to the rapid wheels within him.  His master's
+business and friends, his country's welfare and advancement, these, with
+records, items, anticipations, of the manlier sports to decorate, were
+his current themes; all being chopped and tossed and mixed in salad
+accordance by his fervour of velocity.  And if you would like a further
+definition of Genius, think of it as a form of swiftness.  It is the
+lively young great-grandson, in the brain, of the travelling force which
+mathematicians put to paper, in a row of astounding ciphers, for the
+motion of earth through space; to the generating of heat, whereof is
+multiplication, whereof deposited matter, and so your chaos, your half-
+lighted labyrinth, your, ceaseless pressure to evolvement; and then
+Light, and so Creation, order, the work of Genius.  What do you say?
+
+Without having a great brain, the measure of it possessed by Skepsey was
+alive under strong illumination.  In his heart, while doing penance for
+his presumptuousness, he believed that he could lead regiments of men.
+He was not the army's General, he was the General's Lieutenant, now and
+then venturing to suggest a piece of counsel to his Chief.  On his own
+particular drilled regiments, his Chief may rely; and on his knowledge
+of the country of the campaign, roads, morasses, masking hills, dividing
+rivers.  He had mapped for himself mentally the battles of conquerors in
+his favourite historic reading; and he understood the value of a plan,
+and the danger of sticking to it, and the advantage of a big army for
+flanking; and he manoeuvred a small one cunningly to make it a bolt at
+the telling instant.  Dartrey Fenellan had explained to him Frederick's
+oblique attack, Napoleon's employment of the artillery arm preparatory to
+the hurling of the cataract on the spot of weakness, Wellington's
+parallel march with Marmont up to the hour of the decisive cut through
+the latter at Salamanca; and Skepsey treated his enemy to the like,
+deferentially reporting the engagement to a Chief whom his modesty kept
+in eminence, for the receiving of the principal honours.  As to his men,
+of all classes and sorts, they are so supple with training that they
+sustain a defeat like the sturdy pugilist a knock off his legs, and up
+smiling a minute after--one of the truly beautiful sights on this earth!
+They go at the double half a day, never sounding a single pair of bellows
+among them.  They have their appetites in full control, to eat when they
+can, or cheerfully fast.  They have healthy frames, you see; and as the
+healthy frame is not artificially heated, it ensues that, under any title
+you like, they profess the principles--into the bog we go, we have got
+round to it!--the principles of those horrible marching and chanting
+people!
+
+Then, must our England, to be redoubtable to the enemy, be a detestable
+country for habitation?
+
+Here was a knot.
+
+Skepsey's head dropped lower, he went as a ram.  The sayings of Mr.
+Durance about his dear England: that 'her remainder of life is in the
+activity of her diseases'--that 'she has so fed upon Pap of Compromise
+as to be unable any longer to conceive a muscular resolution': that
+'she is animated only as the carcase to the blow-fly'; and so forth:--
+charged on him during his wrestle with his problem.  And the gentlemen
+had said, had permitted himself to say, that our England's recent history
+was a provincial apothecary's exhibition of the battle of bane and
+antidote.  Mr. Durance could hardly mean it.  But how could one answer
+him when he spoke of the torpor of the people, and of the succeeding
+Governments as a change of lacqueys--or the purse-string's lacqueys?
+He said, that Old England has taken to the arm-chair for good, and thinks
+it her whole business to pronounce opinions and listen to herself;
+and that, in the face of an armed Europe, this great nation is living
+on sufferance.  Oh!
+
+Skepsey had uttered the repudiating exclamation.
+
+'Feel quite up to it?' he was asked by his neighbour.
+
+The mover of armed hosts for the defence of the country sat in a third-
+class carriage of the train, approaching the first of the stations on the
+way to town.  He was instantly up to the level of an external world, and
+fell into give and take with a burly broad communicative man; located in
+London, but born in the North, in view of Durham cathedral, as he thanked
+his Lord; who was of the order of pork-butcher; which succulent calling
+had carried him down to near upon the borders of Surrey and Sussex, some
+miles beyond the new big house of a Mister whose name he had forgotten,
+though he had heard it mentioned by an acquaintance interested in the
+gentleman's doings.  But his object was to have a look at a rare breed of
+swine, worth the journey; that didn't run to fat so much as to flavour,
+had longer legs, sharp snouts to plump their hams; over from Spain, it
+seemed; and the gentleman owning them was for selling them, finding them
+wild past correction.  But the acquaintance mentioned, who was down to
+visit t' other gentleman's big new edifice in workmen's hands, had a
+mother, who had been cook to a family, and was now widow of a cook's
+shop; ham, beef, and sausages, prime pies to order; and a good specimen
+herself; and if ever her son saw her spirit at his bedside, there
+wouldn't be room for much else in that chamber--supposing us to keep our
+shapes.  But he was the right sort of son, anxious to push his mother's
+shop where he saw a chance, and do it cheap; and those foreign pigs,
+after a disappointment to their importer, might be had pretty cheap, and
+were accounted tasty.
+
+Skepsey's main thought was upon war: the man had discoursed of pigs.
+
+He informed the man of his having heard from a scholar, that pigs had
+been the cause of more bloody battles than any other animal.
+
+How so?  the pork-butcher asked, and said he was not much of a scholar,
+and pigs might be provoking, but he had not heard they were a cause of
+strife between man and man.  For possession of them, Skepsey explained.
+Oh! possession!  Why, we've heard of bloody battles for the possession of
+women!  Men will fight for almost anything they care to get or call their
+own, the pork-butcher said; and he praised Old England for avoiding war.
+Skepsey nodded.  How if war is forced on us?  Then we fight. Suppose we
+are not prepared?--We soon get that up. Skepsey requested him to state
+the degree of resistance he might think he could bring against a pair of
+skilful fists, in a place out of hearing of the police.
+
+'Say, you!' said the pork-butcher, and sharply smiled, for he was a man
+of size.
+
+'I would give you two minutes,' rejoined Skepsey, eyeing him intently and
+kindly: insomuch that it could be seen he was not in the conundrum vein.
+
+'Rather short allowance, eh, master?' said the bigger man.  'Feel here';
+he straightened out his arm and doubled it, raising a proud bridge of
+muscle.
+
+Skepsey performed the national homage to muscle.
+
+'Twice that, would not help without the science,' he remarked, and let
+his arm be gripped in turn.
+
+The pork-butcher's throat sounded, as it were, commas and colons,
+punctuations in his reflections, while he tightened fingers along the
+iron lump.  'Stringy.  You're a wiry one, no mistake.'  It was encomium.
+With the ingrained contempt of size for a smallness that has not yet
+taught it the prostrating lesson, he said: 'Weight tells.'
+
+'In a wrestle,' Skepsey admitted.  'Allow me to say, you would not touch
+me.'
+
+'And how do you know I'm not a trifle handy with the maulers myself?'
+
+'You will pardon me for saying, it would be worse for you if you were.'
+
+The pork-butcher was flung backward.  'Are you a Professor, may I
+inquire?'
+
+Skepsey rejected the title.  'I can engage to teach young men, upon a
+proper observance of first principles.'
+
+'They be hanged!' cried the ruffled pork-butcher.  'Our best men never
+got it out of books.  Now, you tell me--you've got a spiflicating style
+of talk about you--no brag, you tell me--course, the best man wins, if
+you mean that: now, if I was one of 'em, and I fetches you a bit of a
+flick, how then?  Would you be ready to step out with a real Professor?'
+
+'I should claim a fair field,' was the answer, made in modesty.
+
+'And you'd expect to whop me with they there principles of yours?'
+
+'I should expect to.'
+
+'Bang me!' was roared.  After a stare at the mild little figure with the
+fitfully dead-levelled large grey eyes in front of him, the pork-butcher
+resumed: 'Take you for the man you say you be, you're just the man for my
+friend Jam and me.  He dearly loves to see a set-to, self the same.  What
+prettier?  And if you would be so obliging some day as to favour us with
+a display, we'd head a cap conformably, whether you'd the best of it,
+according to your expectations, or t' other way:--For there never was
+shame in a jolly good licking as the song says: that is, if you take it
+and make it appear jolly good.  And find you an opponent meet and fit,
+never doubt.  Ever had the worse of an encounter, sir?'
+
+'Often, Sir.'
+
+'Well, that's good.  And it didn't destroy your confidence?'
+
+'Added to it, I hope.'
+
+At this point, it became a crying necessity for Skepsey to escape from
+an area of boastfulness, into which he had fallen inadvertently; and he
+hastened to apologize 'for his personal reference,' that was intended for
+an illustration of our country caught unawares by a highly trained picked
+soldiery, inferior in numbers to the patriotic levies, but sharp at the
+edge and knowing how to strike.  Measure the axe, measure the tree; and
+which goes down first?
+
+'Invasion, is it?--and you mean, we're not to hit back?' the pork-butcher
+bellowed, and presently secured a murmured approbation from an audience
+of three, that had begun to comprehend the dialogue, and strengthened him
+in a manner to teach Skepsey the foolishness of ever urging analogies of
+too extended a circle to close sharply on the mark.  He had no longer a
+chance, he was overborne, identified with the fated invader, rolled away
+into the chops of the Channel, to be swallowed up entire, and not a rag
+left of him, but John Bull tucking up his shirtsleeves on the shingle
+beach, ready for a second or a third; crying to them to come on.
+
+Warmed by his Bullish victory, and friendly to the vanquished, the pork-
+butcher told Skepsey he should like to see more of him, and introduced
+himself on a card Benjamin Shaplow, not far from the Bank.
+
+They parted at the Terminus, where three shrieks of an engine, sounding
+like merry messages of the damned to their congeners in the anticipatory
+stench of the cab-droppings above, disconnected sane hearing; perverted
+it, no doubt.  Or else it was the stamp of a particular name on his mind,
+which impressed Skepsey, as he bored down the street and across the
+bridge, to fancy in recollection, that Mr. Shaplow, when reiterating the
+wish for self and friend to witness a display of his cunning with the
+fists, had spoken the name of Jarniman.  An unusual name yet more than
+one Jarniman might well exist.  And unlikely that a friend of the pork-
+butcher would be the person whom Mr. Radnor first prohibited and then
+desired to receive.  It hardly mattered:--considering that the Dutch Navy
+did really, incredible as it seems now, come sailing a good way up the
+River Thames, into the very main artery of Old England.  And what thought
+the Tower of it?  Skepsey looked at the Tower in sympathy, wondering
+whether the Tower had seen those impudent Dutch a nice people at home,
+he had heard.  Mr. Shaplow's Jarniman might actually be Mr. Radnor's,
+he inclined to think.  At any rate he was now sure of the name.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+WHEREIN WE BEHOLD THE COUPLE JUSTIFIED OF LOVE HAVING SIGHT OF THEIR
+SCOURGE
+
+Fenellan, in a musing exclamation, that was quite spontaneous, had put a
+picture on the departing Skepsey, as observed from an end of the
+Lakelands upper terrace-walk.
+
+'Queer little water-wagtail it is!'  And Lady Grace Halley and Miss
+Graves and Mrs. Cormyn, snugly silken dry ones, were so taken with the
+pretty likeness after hearing Victor call the tripping dripping creature
+the happiest man in England, that they nursed it in their minds for a
+Bewick tailpiece to the chapter of a pleasant rural day.  It imbedded the
+day in an idea that it had been rural.
+
+We are indebted almost for construction to those who will define us
+briefly: we are but scattered leaves to the general comprehension of us
+until such a work of binding and labelling is done.  And should the
+definition be not so correct as brevity pretends to make it at one
+stroke, we are at least rendered portable; thus we pass into the
+conceptions of our fellows, into the records, down to posterity.
+Anecdotes of England's happiest man were related, outlines of his
+personal history requested.  His nomination in chief among the
+traditionally very merry Islanders was hardly borne out by the tale of
+his enchainment with a drunken yokefellow--unless upon the Durance
+version of the felicity of his countrymen; still, the water-wagtail
+carried it, Skepsey trotted into memories.  Heroes conducted up Fame's
+temple-steps by ceremonious historians, who are studious, when the
+platform is reached, of the art of setting them beneath the flambeau
+of a final image, before thrusting them inside to be rivetted on their
+pedestals, have an excellent chance of doing the same, let but the
+provident narrators direct that image to paint the thing a moth-like
+humanity desires, in the thing it shrinks from.  Miss Priscilla Graves
+now fastened her meditations upon Skepsey; and it was important to him.
+
+Tobacco withdrew the haunting shadow of the Rev. Septimus Barmby from
+Nesta.  She strolled beside Louise de Seilles, to breathe sweet-sweet in
+the dear friend's ear and tell her she loved her.  The presence of the
+German had, without rousing animosity, damped the young Frenchwoman, even
+to a revulsion when her feelings had been touched by hearing praise of
+her France, and wounded by the subjects of the praise.  She bore the
+national scar, which is barely skin-clothing of a gash that will not heal
+since her country was overthrown and dismembered.  Colney Durance could
+excuse the unreasonableness in her, for it had a dignity, and she
+controlled it, and quietly suffered, trusting to the steady, tireless,
+concentrated aim of her France.  In the Gallic mind of our time, France
+appears as a prematurely buried Glory, that heaves the mound oppressing
+breath and cannot cease; and calls hourly, at times keenly, to be
+remembered, rescued from the pain and the mould-spots of that foul
+sepulture.  Mademoiselle and Colney were friends, partly divided by her
+speaking once of revanche; whereupon he assumed the chair of the
+Moralist, with its right to lecture, and went over to the enemy; his talk
+savoured of a German.  Our holding of the balance, taking two sides, is
+incomprehensible to a people quivering with the double wound to body and
+soul.  She was of Breton blood.  Cymric enough was in Nesta to catch any
+thrill from her and join to her mood, if it hung out a colour sad or gay,
+and was noble, as any mood of this dear Louise would surely be.
+
+Nataly was not so sympathetic.  Only the Welsh and pure Irish are quick
+at the feelings of the Celtic French.  Nataly came of a Yorkshire stock;
+she had the bravery, humaneness and generous temper of our civilized
+North, and a taste for mademoiselle's fine breeding, with a distaste for
+the singular air of superiority in composure which it was granted to
+mademoiselle to wear with an unassailable reserve when the roughness of
+the commercial boor was obtrusive.  She said of her to Colney, as they
+watched the couple strolling by the lake below: 'Nesta brings her out of
+her frosts.  I suppose it's the presence of Dr. Schlesien.  I have known
+it the same after an evening of Wagner's music.'
+
+'Richard Wagner Germanized ridicule of the French when they were down,'
+said Colney.  'She comes of a blood that never forgives.'
+
+'"Never forgives" is horrible to think of!  I fancied you liked your
+"Kelts," as you call them.'
+
+Colney seized on a topic that shelved a less agreeable one that he saw
+coming.  'You English won't descend to understand what does not resemble
+you.  The French are in a state of feverish patriotism.  You refuse to
+treat them for a case of fever.  They are lopped of a limb: you tell them
+to be at rest!'
+
+'You know I am fond of them.'
+
+'And the Kelts, as they are called, can't and won't forgive injuries;
+look at Ireland, look at Wales, and the Keltic Scot.  Have you heard them
+talk?  It happened in the year 1400: it's alive to them as if it were
+yesterday.  Old History is as dead to the English as their first father.
+They beg for the privilege of pulling the forelock to the bearers of the
+titles of the men who took their lands from them and turn them to the
+uses of cattle.  The Saxon English had, no doubt, a heavier thrashing
+than any people allowed to subsist ever received: you see it to this day;
+the crick of the neck at the name of a lord is now concealed and denied,
+but they have it and betray the effects; and it's patent in their
+Journals, all over their literature.  Where it's not seen, another
+blood's at work.  The Kelt won't accept the form of slavery.  Let him
+be servile, supple, cunning, treacherous, and to appearance time-serving,
+he will always remember his day of manly independence and who robbed him:
+he is the poetic animal of the races of modern men.'
+
+'You give him Pagan colours.'
+
+'Natural colours.  He does not offer the other cheek or turn his back to
+be kicked after a knock to the ground.  Instead of asking him to forgive,
+which he cannot do, you must teach him to admire.  A mercantile community
+guided by Political Economy from the ledger to the banquet presided over
+by its Dagon Capital, finds that difficult.  However, there 's the secret
+of him; that I respect in him.  His admiration of an enemy or oppressor
+doing great deeds, wins him entirely.  He is an active spirit, not your
+negative passive letter-of-Scripture Insensible.  And his faults, short
+of ferocity, are amusing.'
+
+'But the fits of ferocity!'
+
+'They are inconscient, real fits.  They come of a hot nerve.  He is
+manageable, sober too, when his mind is charged.  As to the French
+people, they are the most mixed of any European nation; so they are
+packed with contrasts: they are full of sentiment, they are sharply
+logical; free-thinkers, devotees; affectionate, ferocious; frivolous,
+tenacious; the passion of the season operating like sun or moon on these
+qualities; and they can reach to ideality out of sensualism.  Below your
+level, they're above it: a paradox is at home with them!'
+
+'My friend, you speak seriously--an unusual compliment,' Nataly said,
+and ungratefully continued: 'You know what is occupying me.  I want your
+opinion.  I guess it.  I want to hear--a mean thirst perhaps, and you
+would pay me any number of compliments to avoid the subject; but let me
+hear:--this house!'
+
+Colney shrugged in resignation.  'Victor works himself out,' he replied.
+
+'We are to go through it all again?'
+
+'If you have not the force to contain him.'
+
+'How contain him?'
+
+Up went Colney's shoulders.
+
+'You may see it all before you,' he said, 'straight as the Seine chaussee
+from the hill of La Roche Guyon.'
+
+He looked for her recollection of the scene.
+
+'Ah, the happy ramble that year!' she cried.  'And my Nesta just seven.
+We had been six months at Craye.  Every day of our life together looks
+happy to me, looking back, though I know that every day had the same
+troubles.  I don't think I'm deficient in courage; I think I could meet
+....  But the false position so cruelly weakens me.  I am no woman's
+equal when I have to receive or visit.  It seems easier to meet the worst
+in life-danger, death, anything.  Pardon me for talking so.  Perhaps we
+need not have left Craye or Creckholt .  .  . ?' she hinted an
+interrogation.  'Though I am not sorry; it is not good to be where one
+tastes poison.  Here it may be as deadly, worse.  Dear friend, I am so
+glad you remember La Roche Guyon.  He was popular with the dear French
+people.'
+
+'In spite of his accent.'
+
+'It is not so bad?'
+
+'And that you'll defend!'
+
+'Consider: these neighbours we come among; they may have heard .  .  .'
+
+'Act on the assumption.'
+
+'You forget the principal character.  Victor promises; he may have learnt
+a lesson at Creckholt.  But look at this house he has built.  How can I--
+any woman--contain him!  He must have society.'
+
+'Paraitre!'
+
+'He must be in the front.  He has talked of Parliament.'
+
+Colney's liver took the thrust of a skewer through it.  He spoke as in
+meditative encomium: 'His entry into Parliament would promote himself and
+family to a station of eminence naked over the Clock Tower of the House.'
+
+She moaned.  'At the vilest, I cannot regret my conduct--bear what I may.
+I can bear real pain: what kills me is, the suspicion.  And I feel it
+like a guilty wretch!  And I do not feel the guilt!  I should do the same
+again, on reflection.  I do believe it saved him.  I do; oh!  I do, I do.
+I cannot expect my family to see with my eyes.  You know them--my brother
+and sisters think I have disgraced them; they put no value on my saving
+him.  It sounds childish; it is true.  He had fallen into a terrible
+black mood.'
+
+'He had an hour of gloom.'
+
+'An hour!'
+
+'But an hour, with him!  It means a good deal.'
+
+'Ah, friend, I take your words.  He sinks terribly when he sinks at all.
+--Spare us a little while.--We have to judge of what is good in the
+circumstances: I hear your reply!  But the principal for me to study is
+Victor.  You have accused me of being the voice of the enamoured woman.
+I follow him, I know; I try to advise; I find it is wisdom to submit.
+My people regard my behaviour as a wickedness or a madness.  I did save
+him.  I joined my fate with his.  I am his mate, to help, and I cannot
+oppose him, to distract him.  I do my utmost for privacy. He must
+entertain.  Believe me, I feel for them--sisters and brother.  And now
+that my sisters are married .  .  . My brother has a man's hardness.'
+
+'Colonel Dreighton did not speak harshly, at our last meeting.'
+
+'He spoke of me?'
+
+'He spoke in the tone of a brother.'
+
+'Victor promises--I won't repeat it.  Yes, I see the house!  There
+appears to be a prospect, a hope--I cannot allude to it.  Craye and
+Creckholt may have been some lesson to him.  Selwyn spoke of me kindly?
+Ah, yes, it is the way with my people to pretend that Victor has been the
+ruin of me, that they may come round to family sentiments.  In the same
+way, his relatives, the Duvidney ladies, have their picture of the woman
+misleading him.  Imagine me the naughty adventuress!'--Nataly falsified
+the thought insurgent at her heart, in adding: 'I do not say I am
+blameless.'  It was a concession to the circumambient enemy, of whom even
+a good friend was apart, and not better than a respectful emissary.  The
+dearest of her friends belonged to that hostile world.  Only Victor, no
+other, stood with her against the world.  Her child, yes; the love of her
+child she had; but the child's destiny was an alien phantom, looking at
+her with harder eyes than she had vision of in her family.  She did not
+say she was blameless, did not affect the thought.  She would have wished
+to say, for small encouragement she would have said, that her case could
+be pleaded.
+
+Colney's features were not inviting, though the expression was not
+repellent.  She sighed deeply; and to count on something helpful by
+mentioning it, reverted to the 'prospect' which there appeared to be.
+'Victor speaks of the certainty of his release.'
+
+His release!  Her language pricked a satirist's gallbladder.  Colney
+refrained from speaking to wound, and enjoyed a silence that did it.
+
+'Do you see any possibility?--you knew her,' she said coldly.
+
+'Counting the number of times he has been expecting the release, he is
+bound to believe it near at hand.'
+
+'You don't?' she asked: her bosom was up in a crisis of expectation for
+the answer: and on a pause of half-a-minute, she could have uttered the
+answer herself.
+
+He perceived the insane eagerness through her mask, and despised it,
+pitying the woman.  'And you don't,' he said.  'You catch at delusions,
+to excuse the steps you consent to take.  Or you want me to wear the
+blinkers, the better to hoodwink your own eyes.  You see it as well as I:
+If you enter that house, you have to go through the same as at
+Creckholt:--and he'll be the first to take fright.'
+
+'He finds you in tears: he is immensely devoted; he flings up all to
+protect "his Nataly."'
+
+'No: you are unjust to him.  He would fling up all:'--
+
+'But his Nataly prefers to be dragged through fire?  As you please!'
+
+She bowed to her chastisement.  One motive in her consultation with him
+came of the knowledge of his capacity to inflict it and his honesty in
+the act, and a thirst she had to hear the truth loud-tongued from him;
+together with a feeling that he was excessive and satiric, not to be read
+by the letter of his words: and in consequence, she could bear the lash
+from him, and tell her soul that he overdid it, and have an unjustly-
+treated self to cherish.--But in very truth she was a woman who loved to
+hear the truth; she was formed to love the truth her position reduced her
+to violate; she esteemed the hearing it as medical to her; she selected
+for counsellor him who would apply it: so far she went on the straight
+way; and the desire for a sustaining deception from the mouth of a
+trustworthy man set her hanging on his utterances with an anxious hope of
+the reverse of what was to come and what she herself apprehended, such as
+checked her pulses and iced her feet and fingers.  The reason being, not
+that she was craven or absurd or paradoxical, but that, living at an
+intenser strain upon her nature than she or any around her knew, her
+strength snapped, she broke down by chance there where Colney was
+rendered spiteful in beholding the display of her inconsequent if not
+puling sex.
+
+She might have sought his counsel on another subject, if a paralyzing
+chill of her frame in the foreview of it had allowed her to speak: she
+felt grave alarms in one direction, where Nesta stood in the eye of her
+father; besides an unformed dread that the simplicity in generosity of
+Victor's nature was doomed to show signs of dross ultimately, under the
+necessity he imposed upon himself to run out his forecasts, and scheme,
+and defensively compel the world to serve his ends, for the protection of
+those dear to him.
+
+At night he was particularly urgent with her for the harmonious duet in
+praise of Lakelands; and plied her with questions all round and about it,
+to bring out the dulcet accord.  He dwelt on his choice of costly
+marbles, his fireplace and mantelpiece designs, the great hall, and
+suggestions for imposing and beautiful furniture; concordantly enough,
+for the large, the lofty and rich of colour won her enthusiasm; but
+overwhelmingly to any mood of resistance; and strangely in a man who had
+of late been adopting, as if his own, a modern tone, or the social and
+literary hints of it, relating to the right uses of wealth, and the duty
+as well as the delight of living simply.
+
+'Fredi was pleased.'
+
+'Yes, she was, dear.'
+
+'She is our girl, my love.  "I could live and die here!"  Live, she may.
+There's room enough.'
+
+Nataly saw the door of a covert communication pointed at in that remark.
+She gathered herself for an effort to do battle.
+
+'She's quite a child, Victor.'
+
+'The time begins to run.  We have to look forward now:--I declare, it's
+I who seem the provident mother for Fredi!'
+
+'Let our girl wait; don't hurry her mind to .  .  .  She is happy with
+her father and mother.  She is in the happiest time of her life, before
+those feelings distract.'
+
+'If we see good fortune for her, we can't let it pass her.'
+
+A pang of the resolution now to debate the case with Victor, which would
+be of necessity to do the avoided thing and roll up the forbidden curtain
+opening on their whole history past and prospective, was met in Nataly's
+bosom by the more bitter immediate confession that she was not his match.
+To speak would be to succumb; and shamefully after the effort; and
+hopelessly after being overborne by him.  There was not the anticipation
+of a set contest to animate the woman's naturally valiant heart; he was
+too strong: and his vividness in urgency overcame her in advance,
+fascinated her sensibility through recollection; he fanned an
+inclination, lighted it to make it a passion, a frenzied resolve--she
+remembered how and when.  She had quivering cause to remember the fateful
+day of her step, in a letter received that morning from a married sister,
+containing no word of endearment or proposal for a meeting.  An
+unregretted day, if Victor would think of the dues to others; that is,
+would take station with the world to see his reflected position, instead
+of seeing it through their self-justifying knowledge of the honourable
+truth of their love, and pressing to claim and snatch at whatsoever the
+world bestows on its orderly subjects.
+
+They had done evil to no one as yet.  Nataly thought that; not-
+withstanding the outcry of the ancient and withered woman who bore
+Victor Radnor's name: for whom, in consequence of the rod the woman had
+used, this tenderest of hearts could summon no emotion.  If she had it,
+the thing was not to be hauled up to consciousness.  Her feeling was,
+that she forgave the wrinkled Malignity: pity and contrition dissolving
+in the effort to produce the placable forgiveness.  She was frigid
+because she knew rightly of herself, that she in the place of power would
+never have struck so meanly.  But the mainspring of the feeling in an
+almost remorseless bosom drew from certain chance expressions of
+retrospective physical distaste on Victor's part;--hard to keep from a
+short utterance between the nuptial two, of whom the unshamed exuberant
+male has found the sweet reverse in his mate, a haven of heavenliness,
+to delight in:--these conjoined with a woman's unspoken pleading ideas
+of her own, on her own behalf, had armed her jealously in vindication
+of Nature.
+
+Now, as long as they did no palpable wrong about them, Nataly could argue
+her case in her conscience--deep down and out of hearing, where women
+under scourge of the laws they have not helped decree may and do deliver
+their minds.  She stood in that subterranean recess for Nature against
+the Institutions of Man: a woman little adapted for the post of revel;
+but to this, by the agency of circumstances, it had come; she who was
+designed by nature to be an ornament of those Institutions opposed them
+and when thinking of the rights and the conduct of the decrepit
+Legitimate--virulent in a heathen vindictiveness declaring itself holy--
+she had Nature's logic, Nature's voice, for self-defence.  It was
+eloquent with her, to the deafening of other voices in herself, even to
+the convincing of herself, when she was wrought by the fires within to
+feel elementally.  The other voices within her issued of the acknowledged
+dues to her family and to the world--the civilization protecting women:
+sentences thereanent in modern books and Journals.  But the remembrance
+of moods of fiery exaltation, when the Nature she called by name of Love
+raised the chorus within to stop all outer buzzing, was, in a perpetual
+struggle with a whirlpool, a constant support while she and Victor were
+one at heart.  The sense of her standing alone made her sway; and a
+thought of differences with him caused frightful apprehensions of the
+abyss.
+
+Luxuriously she applied to his public life for witness that he had
+governed wisely as well as affectionately so long; and he might
+therefore, with the chorussing of the world of public men, expect a woman
+blindfold to follow his lead.  But no; we may be rebels against our time
+and its Laws: if we are really for Nature, we are not lawless.  Nataly's
+untutored scruples, which came side by side with her ability to plead for
+her acts, restrained her from complicity in the ensnaring of a young man
+of social rank to espouse the daughter of a couple socially insurgent-
+stained, to common thinking, should denunciation come.  The Nature
+upholding her fled at a vision of a stranger entangled.  Pitiable to
+reflect, that he was not one of the adventurer-lords of prey who hunt
+and run down shadowed heiresses and are congratulated on their luck in a
+tolerating country!  How was the young man to be warned?  How, under the
+happiest of suppositions, propitiate his family!  And such a family,
+if consenting with knowledge, would consent only for the love of money.
+It was angling with as vile a bait as the rascal lord's.  Humiliation
+hung on the scheme; it struck to scorching in the contemplation of it.
+And it darkened her reading of Victor's character.
+
+She did not ask for the specification of a 'good fortune that might
+pass'; wishing to save him from his wonted twists of elusiveness, and
+herself with him from the dread discussion it involved upon one point.
+
+'The day was pleasant to all, except perhaps poor mademoiselle,' she
+said.
+
+'Peridon should have come?'
+
+'Present or absent, his chances are not brilliant, I fear.'
+
+'And Pempton and Priscy!'
+
+'They are growing cooler!'
+
+'With their grotesque objections to one another's habits at table!'
+
+'Can we ever hope to get them over it?'
+
+'When Priscy drinks Port and Pempton munches beef, Colney says.'
+
+'I should say, when they feel warmly enough to think little of their
+differences.'
+
+'Fire smoothes the creases, yes; and fire is what they're both wanting
+in.  Though Priscy has Concert-pathos in her voice:--couldn't act a bit!
+And Pempton's 'cello tones now and then have gone through me--simply from
+his fiddle-bow, I believe.  Don't talk to me of feeling in a couple,
+within reach of one another and sniffing objections.--Good, then, for a
+successful day to-day so far?'
+
+He neared her, wooing her; and she assented, with a franker smile than
+she had worn through the day.
+
+The common burden on their hearts--the simple discussion to come of the
+task of communicating dire actualities to their innocent Nesta--was laid
+aside.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Admiration of an enemy or oppressor doing great deeds
+Aristocratic assumption of licence
+But what is it we do (excepting cricket, of course)
+Consent of circumstances
+Continued trust in the man--is the alternative of despair
+Critical fashion of intimates who know as well as hear
+Despises hostile elements and goes unpunished
+Dithyrambic inebriety of narration
+Feminine; coming when she willed and flying when wanted
+Fire smoothes the creases
+Frankness as an armour over wariness
+Half a dozen dozen left
+Hard to bear, at times unbearable
+Haremed opinion of the unfitness of women
+He neared her, wooing her; and she assented
+He never acknowledged a trouble, he dispersed it
+He prattled, in the happy ignorance of compulsion
+He sinks terribly when he sinks at all
+Heathen vindictiveness declaring itself holy
+If we are really for Nature, we are not lawless
+In bottle if not on draught (oratory)
+In the pay of our doctors
+Intrusion of hard material statements, facts
+Kelts, as they are called, can't and won't forgive injuries
+Man with a material object in aim, is the man of his object
+Nature and Law never agreed
+Nature's logic, Nature's voice, for self-defence
+Next door to the Last Trump
+Obeseness is the most sensitive of our ailments
+Once out of the rutted line, you are food for lion and jackal
+One wants a little animation in a husband
+People of a provocative prosperity
+Self-deceiver may be a persuasive deceiver of another
+She was not his match--To speak would be to succumb
+Slap and pinch and starve our appetites
+Smallest of our gratifications in life could give a happy tone
+Smothered in its pudding-bed of the grotesque (obesity)
+Snuffle of hypocrisy in her prayer
+State of feverish patriotism
+Statistics are according to their conjurors
+Subterranean recess for Nature against the Institutions of Man
+Tale, which leaves the man's mind at home
+The effects of the infinitely little
+The old confession, that we cannot cook(The English)
+They do not live; they are engines
+They helped her to feel at home with herself
+Thought of differences with him caused frightful apprehensions
+Unshamed exuberant male has found the sweet reverse in his mate
+We cannot relinquish an idea that was ours
+We've all a parlous lot too much pulpit in us
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of One Our Conquerors, v1
+by George Meredith
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS
+
+By GEORGE MEREDITH
+
+1897
+
+
+
+BOOK 2.
+
+XII.      TREATS OF THE DUMBNESS POSSIBLE WITH MEMBERS OF A HOUSEHOLD
+          HAVING ONE HEART
+XIII.     THE LATEST OF MRS. BURMAN
+XIV.      DISCLOSES A STAGE ON THE DRIVE TO PARIS
+XV.       A PATRIOT ABROAD
+XVI.      ACCOUNTS FOR SKEPSEY'S MISCONDUCT, SHOWING HOW IT AFFECTED
+          NATALY
+XVII.     CHIEFLY UPON THE THEME OF A YOUNG MAID'S IMAGININGS
+XVIII.    SUITORS FOR THE HAND OF NESTA VICTORIA
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+TREATS OF THE DUMBNESS POSSIBLE WITH MEMBERS OF A HOUSEHOLD HAVING ONE
+HEART
+
+Two that live together in union are supposed to be intimate on every
+leaf.  Particularly when they love one another and the cause they have
+at heart is common to them in equal measure, the uses of a cordial
+familiarity forbid reserves upon important matters between them, as we
+think; not thinking of an imposed secretiveness, beneath the false
+external of submissiveness, which comes of an experience of repeated
+inefficiency to maintain a case in opposition, on the part of the
+loquently weaker of the pair.  In Constitutional Kingdoms a powerful
+Government needs not to be tyrannical to lean oppressively; it is more
+serviceable to party than agreeable to country; and where the alliance
+of men and women binds a loving couple, of whom one is a torrent of
+persuasion, their differings are likely to make the other resemble a log
+of the torrent.  It is borne along; it dreams of a distant corner of the
+way for a determined stand; it consents to its whirling in anticipation
+of an undated hour when it will no longer be neutral.
+
+There may be, moreover, while each has the key of the fellow breast,
+a mutually sensitive nerve to protest against intrusion of light or
+sound.  The cloud over the name of their girl could now strike Nataly and
+Victor dumb in their taking of counsel.  She divined that his hint had
+encouraged him to bring the crisis nearer, and he that her comprehension
+had become tremblingly awake.  They shrank, each of them, the more from
+an end drawing closely into view.  All subjects glooming off or darkening
+up to it were shunned by them verbally, and if they found themselves
+entering beneath that shadow, conversation passed to an involuntary
+gesture, more explicit with him, significant of the prohibited, though
+not acknowledging it.
+
+All the stronger was it Victor's purpose, leaping in his fashion to the
+cover of action as an escape from perplexity, to burn and scheme for the
+wedding of their girl--the safe wedding of that dearest, to have her
+protected, secure, with the world warm about her.  And he well knew why
+his Nataly had her look of a closed vault (threatening, if opened, to
+thunder upon Life) when he dropped his further hints.  He chose to call
+it feminine inconsistency, in a woman who walked abroad with a basket of
+marriage-ties for the market on her arm.  He knew that she would soon
+have to speak the dark words to their girl; and the idea of any doing of
+it, caught at his throat.  Reasonably she dreaded the mother's task;
+pardonably indeed.  But it is for the mother to do, with a girl.
+He deputed it lightly to the mother because he could see himself stating
+the facts to a son.  'And, my dear boy, you will from this day draw your
+five thousand a year, and we double it on the day of your marriage,
+living at Lakelands or where you will.'
+
+His desire for his girl's protection by the name of one of our great
+Families, urged him to bind Nataly to the fact, with the argument, that
+it was preferable for the girl to hear their story during her green early
+youth, while she reposed her beautiful blind faith in the discretion of
+her parents, and as an immediate step to the placing of her hand in a
+husband's.  He feared that her mother required schooling to tell the
+story vindicatingly and proudly, in a manner to distinguish instead of
+degrading or temporarily seeming to accept degradation.
+
+The world would weigh on her confession of the weight of the world on her
+child; she would want inciting and strengthening, if one judged of her
+capacity to meet the trial by her recent bearing; and how was he to do
+it!  He could not imagine himself encountering the startled, tremulous,
+nascent intelligence in those pure brown darklashed eyes of Nesta; he
+pitied the poor mother.  Fancifully directing her to say this and that to
+the girl, his tongue ran till it was cut from his heart and left to wag
+dead colourless words.
+
+The prospect of a similar business of exposition, certainly devolving
+upon the father in treaty with the fortunate youth, gripped at his vitals
+a minute, so intense was his pride in appearing woundless and scarless,
+a shining surface, like pure health's, in the sight of men.  Nevertheless
+he skimmed the story, much as a lecturer strikes his wand on the
+prominent places of a map, that is to show us how he arrived at the
+principal point, which we are all agreed to find chiefly interesting.
+This with Victor was the naming of Nesta's bridal endowment.  He rushed
+to it.  'My girl will have ten thousand a year settled on her the day of
+her marriage.'  Choice of living at Lakelands was offered.
+
+It helped him over the unpleasant part of that interview.  At the same
+time, it moved him to a curious contempt of the youth.  He had to
+conjure-up an image of the young man in person, to correct the
+sentiment:--and it remained as a kind of bruise only half cured.
+
+Mr. Dudley Sowerby was not one of the youths whose presence would rectify
+such an abstract estimate of the genus pursuer.  He now came frequently
+of an evening, to practise a duet for flutes with Victor;--a Mercadante,
+honeyed and flowing; too honeyed to suit a style that, as Fenellan
+characterized it to Nataly, went through the music somewhat like an
+inquisitive tourist in a foreign town, conscientious to get to the end of
+the work of pleasure; until the notes had become familiar, when it rather
+resembled a constable's walk along the midnight streets into collision
+with a garlanded roysterer; and the man of order and the man of passion,
+true to the measure though they were, seeming to dissent, almost to
+wrangle, in their different ways of winding out the melody, on to the
+last movement; which was plainly a question between home to the strayed
+reveller's quarters or off to the lockup.  Victor was altogether the
+younger of the two.  But his vehement accompaniment was a tutorship;
+Mr. Sowerby improved; it was admitted by Nesta and mademoiselle that
+he gained a show of feeling; he had learnt that feeling was wanted.
+Passion, he had not a notion of: otherwise he would not be delaying;
+the interview, dramatized by the father of the young bud of womanhood,
+would be taking place, and the entry into Lakelands calculable, for
+Nataly's comfort, as under the aegis of the Cantor earldom.  Gossip flies
+to a wider circle round the members of a great titled family, is
+inaudible; or no longer the diptherian whisper the commonalty hear of the
+commonalty: and so we see the social uses of our aristocracy survive.  We
+do not want the shield of any family; it is the situation that wants it;
+Nataly ought to be awake to the fact.  One blow and we have silenced our
+enemy: Nesta's wedding-day has relieved her parents.
+
+Victor's thoughts upon the instrument for striking that, blow, led him to
+suppose Mr. Sowerby might be meditating on the extent of the young lady's
+fortune.  He talked randomly of money, in a way to shatter Nataly's
+conception of him.  He talked of City affairs at table, as it had been
+his practice to shun the doing; and hit the resounding note on mines,
+which have risen in the market like the crest of a serpent, casting a
+certain spell upon the mercantile understanding.  'Fredi's diamonds from
+her own mine, or what once was--and she still reserves a share,' were to
+be shown to Mr. Sowerby.
+
+Nataly respected the young fellow for not displaying avidity at the
+flourish of the bait, however it might be affecting him; and she fancied
+that he did laboriously, in his way earnestly, study her girl, to sound
+for harmony between them, previous to a wooing.  She was a closer reader
+of social character than Victor; from refraining to run on the broad
+lines which are but faintly illustrative of the individual one in being
+common to all--unless we have hit by chance on an example of the
+downright in roguery or folly or simple goodness.  Mr. Sowerby'g bearing
+to Nesta was hardly warmed by the glitter of diamonds.  His next visit
+showed him livelier in courtliness, brighter, fresher; but that was
+always his way at the commencement of every visit, as if his reflections
+on the foregone had come to a satisfactory conclusion; and the labours of
+the new study of the maiden ensued again in due course to deaden him.
+
+Gentleman he was.  In the recognition of his quality as a man of
+principle and breeding, Nataly was condemned by thoughts of Nesta's
+future to question whether word or act of hers should, if inclination on
+both sides existed, stand between her girl and a true gentleman.  She
+counselled herself, as if the counsel were in requisition, to be passive;
+and so doing, she more acutely than Victor--save in his chance flashes--
+discerned the twist of her very nature caused by their false position.
+And her panacea for ills, the lost little cottage, would not have averted
+it: she would there have had the same coveting desire to name a man of
+breeding, honour, station, for Nesta's husband.  Perhaps in the cottage,
+choosing at leisure, her consent to see the brilliant young creature tied
+to the best of dull men would have been unready, without the girl to push
+it.  For the Hon. Dudley was lamentably her pupil in liveliness; he took
+the second part, as it is painful for a woman with the old-fashioned
+ideas upon the leading of the sexes to behold; resembling in his look the
+deaf, who constantly require to have an observation repeated; resembling
+the most intelligent of animals, which we do not name, and we reprove
+ourselves for seeing likeness.
+
+Yet the likeness or apparent likeness would suggest that we have not so
+much to fear upon the day of the explanation to him.  Some gain is there.
+Shameful thought!  Nataly hastened her mind to gather many instances or
+indications testifying to the sterling substance in young Mr. Sowerby,
+such as a mother would pray for her son-in-law to possess.  She
+discovered herself feeling as the burdened mother, not providently for
+her girl, in the choice of a mate.  The perception was clear, and not the
+less did she continue working at the embroidery of Mr. Sowerby on the
+basis of his excellent moral foundations, all the while hoping, praying,
+that he might not be lured on to the proposal for Nesta.  But her
+subservience to the power of the persuasive will in Victor--which was
+like the rush of a conflagration--compelled her to think realizingly of
+any scheme he allowed her darkly to read.
+
+Opposition to him, was comparable to the stand of blocks of timber before
+flame.  Colney Durance had done her the mischief we take from the
+pessimist when we are overweighted: in darkening the vision of external
+aid from man or circumstance to one who felt herself mastered.  Victor
+could make her treacherous to her wishes, in revolt against them, though
+the heart protested.  His first conquest of her was in her blood, to
+weaken a spirit of resistance.  For the precedent of submission is a
+charm upon the faint-hearted through love: it unwinds, unwills them.
+Nataly resolved fixedly, that there must be a day for speaking; and she
+had her moral sustainment in the resolve; she had also a tormenting
+consciousness of material support in the thought, that the day was not
+present, was possibly distant, might never arrive.  Would Victor's
+release come sooner?  And that was a prospect bearing resemblance to
+hopes of the cure of a malady through a sharp operation.
+
+These were matters going on behind the curtain; as wholly vital to her,
+and with him at times almost as dominant, as the spiritual in memory,
+when flesh has left but its shining track in dust of a soul outwritten;
+and all their talk related to the purchase of furniture, the expeditions
+to Lakelands, music, public affairs, the pardonable foibles of friends
+created to amuse their fellows, operatic heroes and heroines, exhibitions
+of pictures, the sorrows of Crowned Heads, so serviceable ever to mankind
+as an admonition to the ambitious, a salve to the envious!--in fine,
+whatsoever can entertain or affect the most social of couples,
+domestically without a care to appearance.  And so far they partially--
+dramatically--deceived themselves by imposing on the world while they
+talked and duetted; for the purchase of furniture from a flowing purse
+is a cheerful occupation; also a City issuing out of hospital, like this
+poor City of London, inspires good citizens to healthy activity.  But the
+silence upon what they were most bent on, had the sinister effect upon
+Victor, of obscuring his mental hold of the beloved woman, drifting her
+away from him.  In communicating Fenellan's news through the lawyer
+Carling of Mrs. Burman's intentions, he was aware that there was an
+obstacle to his being huggingly genial, even candidly genial with her,
+until he could deal out further news, corroborative and consecutive,
+to show the action of things as progressive.  Fenellan had sunk into his
+usual apathy:--and might plead the impossibility of his moving faster
+than the woman professing to transform herself into, beneficence out of
+malignity;--one could hear him saying the words!  Victor had not seen him
+since last Concert evening, and he deemed it as well to hear the words
+Fenellan's mouth had to say.  He called at an early hour of the Westward
+tidal flow at the Insurance Office looking over the stormy square of the
+first of Seamen.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE LATEST OF MRS. BURMAN
+
+After cursory remarks about the business of the Office and his friend's
+contributions to periodical literature, in which he was interested for as
+long as he had assurance that the safe income depending upon official
+duties was not endangered by them, Victor kicked his heels to and fro.
+Fenellan waited for him to lead.
+
+'Have you seen that man, her lawyer, again?'
+
+'I have dined with Mr. Carling:--capital claret.'
+
+Emptiness was in the reply.
+
+Victor curbed himself and said: 'By the way, you're not likely to have
+dealings with Blathenoy.  The fellow has a screw to the back of a shifty
+eye; I see it at work to fix the look for business.  I shall sit on the
+Board of my Bank.  One hears things.  He lives in style at Wrensham.  By
+the way, Fredi has little Mab Mountney from Creckholt staying with her.
+You said of little Mabsy--"Here she comes into the room all pink and
+white, like a daisy."  She's the daisy still; reminds us of our girl at
+that age.--So, then, we come to another dead block!'
+
+'Well, no; it's a chemist's shop, if that helps us on,' said Fenellan,
+settling to a new posture in his chair.  'She's there of an afternoon for
+hours.'
+
+'You mean it's she?'
+
+'The lady.  I 'll tell you.  I have it from Carling, worthy man; and
+lawyers can be brought to untruss a point over a cup of claret.  He's a
+bit of a "Mackenzie Man," as old aunts of mine used to say at home--a Man
+of Feeling.  Thinks he knows the world, from having sifted and sorted a
+lot of our dustbins; as the modern Realists imagine it's an exposition of
+positive human nature when they've pulled down our noses to the worst
+parts--if there's a worse where all are useful: but the Realism of the
+dogs is to have us by the nose:--excite it and befoul it, and you're
+fearfully credible!  You don't read that olfactory literature.  However,
+friend Carling is a conciliatory carle.  Three or four days of the week
+the lady, he says, drives to her chemist's, and there she sits in the
+shop; round the corner, as you enter; and sees all Charing in the shop
+looking-glass at the back; herself a stranger spectacle, poor lady, if
+Carling's picture of her is not overdone; with her fashionable no-bonnet
+striding the contribution chignon on the crown, and a huge square green
+shade over her forehead.  Sits hours long, and cocks her ears at orders
+of applicants for drugs across the counter, and sometimes catches wind
+of a prescription, and consults her chemist, and thinks she 'll try it
+herself.  It's a basket of medicine bottles driven to Regent's Park
+pretty well every day.'
+
+'Ha! Regent's Park!' exclaimed Victor, and shook at recollections of the
+district and the number of the house, dismal to him.  London buried the
+woman deep until a mention of her sent her flaring over London.  'A
+chemist's shop!  She sits there?'
+
+'Mrs. Burman.  We pass by the shop.'
+
+'She had always a turn for drugs.--Not far from here, did you say?  And
+every day! under a green shade?'
+
+'Dear fellow, don't be suggesting ballads; we'll go now,' said Fenellan.
+'It 's true it's like sitting on the banks of the Stygian waters.'
+
+He spied at an obsequious watch, that told him it was time to quit the
+office.
+
+'You've done nothing?' Victor asked in a tone of no expectation.
+
+'Only to hear that her latest medical man is Themison.'
+
+'Where did you hear?'
+
+'Across the counter of Boyle and Luckwort, the lady's chemists.  I called
+the day before yesterday, after you were here at our last Board Meeting.'
+
+'The Themison?'
+
+'The great Dr. Themison; who kills you kindlier than most, and is much in
+request for it.'
+
+'There's one of your echoes of Colney!' Victor cried.  'One gets dead
+sick of that worn-out old jibeing at doctors.  They don't kill, you know
+very well.  It 's not to their interest to kill.  They may take the
+relish out of life; and upon my word, I believe that helps to keep the
+patient living!'
+
+Fenellan sent an eye of discreet comic penetration travelling through his
+friend.
+
+'The City's mending; it's not the weary widow woman of the day when we
+capsized the diurnal with your royal Old Veuve,' he said, as they trod
+the pavement.  'Funny people, the English!  They give you all the
+primeing possible for amusement and jollity, and devil a sentry-box for
+the exercise of it; and if you shake a leg publicly, partner or not,
+you're marched off to penitence.  I complain, that they have no
+philosophical appreciation of human nature.'
+
+'We pass the shop?' Victor interrupted him.
+
+'You're in view of it in a minute.  And what a square, for recreative
+dancing!  And what a people, to be turning it into a place of political
+agitation!  And what a country, where from morning to night it's an
+endless wrangle about the first conditions of existence!  Old Colney
+seems right now and then: they 're the offspring of pirates, and they 've
+got the manners and tastes of their progenitors, and the trick of
+quarrelling everlastingly over the booty.  I 'd have band-music here for
+a couple of hours, three days of the week at the least; and down in the
+East; and that forsaken North quarter of London; and the Baptist South
+too.  But just as those omnibus-wheels are the miserable music of this
+London of ours, it 's only too sadly true that the people are in the
+first rumble of the notion of the proper way to spend their lives.  Now
+you see the shop: Boyle and Luckwort: there.'
+
+Victor looked.  He threw his coat open, and pulled the waistcoat, and
+swelled it, ahemming.  'That shop?' said he.  And presently: 'Fenellan,
+I'm not superstitious, I think.  Now listen; I declare to you, on the day
+of our drinking Old Veuve together last--you remember it,--I walked home
+up this way across the square, and I was about to step into that
+identical shop, for some household prescription in my pocket, having
+forgotten Nataly's favourite City chemists Fenbird and Jay, when--I'm
+stating a fact--I distinctly--I 'm sure of the shop--felt myself plucked
+back by the elbow; pulled back the kind of pull when you have to put a
+foot backward to keep your equilibrium.'
+
+So does memory inspired by the sensations contribute an additional item
+for the colouring of history.
+
+He touched the elbow, showed a flitting face of crazed amazement in
+amusement, and shrugged and half-laughed, dismissing the incident, as
+being perhaps, if his hearer chose to have it so, a gem of the rubbish
+tumbled into the dustcart out of a rather exceptional householder's
+experience.
+
+Fenellan smiled indulgently.  'Queer things happen.  I recollect reading
+in my green youth of a clergyman, who mounted a pulpit of the port where
+he was landed after his almost solitary rescue from a burning ship at
+midnight in mid-sea, to inform his congregation, that he had overnight of
+the catastrophe a personal Warning right in his ear from a Voice, when at
+his bed or bunk-side, about to perform the beautiful ceremony of
+undressing: and the Rev. gentleman was to lie down in his full uniform,
+not so much as to relieve himself of his boots, the Voice insisted twice;
+and he obeyed it, despite the discomfort to his poor feet; and he jumped
+up in his boots to the cry of Fire, and he got them providentially over
+the scuffling deck straight at the first rush into the boat awaiting
+them, and had them safe on and polished the day he preached the sermon of
+gratitude for the special deliverance.  There was a Warning!  and it
+might well be called, as he called it, from within.  We're cared for,
+never doubt.  Aide-toi.  Be ready dressed to help yourself in a calamity,
+or you'll not stand in boots at your next Sermon, contrasting with the
+burnt.  That sounds like the moral.'
+
+'She could have seen me,' Victor threw out an irritable suggestion.  The
+idea of the recent propinquity set hatred in motion.
+
+'Scarcely likely.  I'm told she sits looking on her lap, under the
+beetling shade, until she hears an order for tinctures or powders, or a
+mixture that strikes her fancy.  It's possible to do more suicidal things
+than sit the afternoons in a chemist's shop and see poor creatures get
+their different passports to Orcus.'
+
+Victor stepped mutely beneath the windows of the bellied glass-urns of
+chemical wash.  The woman might be inside there now!  She might have seen
+his figure in the shop-mirror!  And she there!  The wonder of it all
+seemed to be, that his private history was not walking the streets.
+The thinness of the partition concealing it, hardly guaranteed a day's
+immunity: because this woman would live in London, in order to have her
+choice of a central chemist's shop, where she could feed a ghastly
+imagination on the various recipes .  .  .  and while it would have been
+so much healthier for her to be living in a recess of the country!
+
+He muttered: 'Diseases--drugs!'
+
+Those were the corresponding two strokes of the pendulum which kept the
+woman going.
+
+'And deadly spite.'  That was the emanation of the monotonous horrible
+conflict, for which, and by which, the woman lived.
+
+In the neighbourhood of the shop, he could not but think of her through
+the feelings of a man scorched by a furnace.
+
+A little further on, he said: 'Poor soul!' He confessed to himself, that
+latterly he had, he knew not why, been impatient with her, rancorous in
+thought, as never before.  He had hitherto aimed at a picturesque
+tolerance of her vindictiveness; under suffering, both at Craye and
+Creckholt; and he had been really forgiving.  He accused her of dragging
+him down to humanity's lowest.
+
+But if she did that, it argued the possession of a power of a sort.
+
+Her station in the chemist's shop he passed almost daily, appeared to him
+as a sudden and a terrific rush to the front; though it was only a short
+drive from the house in Regent's Park; but having shaken-off that house,
+he had pushed it back into mists, obliterated it.  The woman certainly
+had a power.
+
+He shot away to the power he knew of in himself; his capacity for winning
+men in bodies, the host of them, when it came to an effort of his
+energies: men and, individually, women.  Individually, the women were to
+be counted on as well; warm supporters.
+
+It was the admission of a doubt that he might expect to enroll them
+collectively.  Eyeing the men, he felt his command of them.  Glancing at
+congregated women, he had a chill.  The Wives and Spinsters in ghostly
+judicial assembly: that is, the phantom of the offended collective woman:
+that is, the regnant Queen Idea issuing from our concourse of civilized
+life to govern Society, and pronounce on the orderly, the tolerable, the
+legal, and banish the rebellious: these maintained an aspect of the stand
+against him.
+
+Did Nataly read the case: namely, that the crowned collective woman is
+not to be subdued?  And what are we to say of the indefinite but forcible
+Authority, when we see it upholding Mrs. Burman to crush a woman like
+Nataly!
+
+Victor's novel exercises in reflection were bringing him by hard degrees
+to conceive it to be the impalpable which has prevailing weight.  Not
+many of our conquerors have scored their victories on the road of that
+index: nor has duration been granted them to behold the minute measure of
+value left even tangible after the dust of the conquest subsides.  The
+passing by a shop where a broken old woman might be supposed to sit
+beneath her green forehead-shade--Venetian-blind of a henbane-visage!--
+had precipitated him into his first real grasp of the abstract verity:
+and it opens on to new realms, which are a new world to the practical
+mind.  But he made no advance.  He stopped in a fever of sensibility,
+to contemplate the powerful formless vapour rolling from a source that
+was nothing other than yonder weak lonely woman.
+
+In other words, the human nature of the man was dragged to the school of
+its truancy by circumstances, for him to learn the commonest of sums done
+on a slate, in regard to payment of debts and the unrelaxing grip of the
+creditor on the defaulter.  Debtors are always paying like those who are
+guilty of the easiest thing in life, the violation of Truth, they have
+made themselves bondmen to pay, if not in substance, then in soul; and
+the nipping of the soul goes on for as long as the concrete burden is
+undischarged.  You know the Liar; you must have seen him diminishing,
+until he has become a face without features, withdrawn to humanity's
+preliminary sketch (some half-dozen frayed threads of woeful outline on
+our original tapestry-web); and he who did the easiest of things, he must
+from such time sweat in being the prodigy of inventive nimbleness, up to
+the day when he propitiates Truth by telling it again.  There is a
+repentance that does reconstitute!  It may help to the traceing to
+springs of a fable whereby men have been guided thus far out of the wood.
+
+Victor would have said truly that he loved Truth; that he paid every debt
+with a scrupulous exactitude: money, of course; and prompt apologies for
+a short brush of his temper.  Nay, he had such a conscience for the
+smallest eruptions of a transient irritability, that the wish to say a
+friendly mending word to the Punctilio donkey of London Bridge, softened
+his retrospective view of the fall there, more than once.  Although this
+man was a presentation to mankind of the force in Nature which drives to
+unresting speed, which is the vitality of the heart seen at its beating
+after a plucking of it from the body, he knew himself for the reverse of
+lawless; he inclined altogether to good citizenship.  So social a man
+could not otherwise incline.  But when it came to the examination of
+accounts between Mrs. Burman and himself, spasms of physical revulsion,
+loathings, his excessive human nature, put her out of Court.  To men,
+it was impossible for him to speak the torments of those days of the
+monstrous alliance.  The heavens were cognizant.  He pleaded his case
+in their accustomed hearing:--a youngster tempted by wealth, attracted,
+besought, snared, revolted, etc.  And Mrs. Burman, when roused to
+jealousy, had shown it by teazing him for a confession of his admiration
+of splendid points in the beautiful Nataly, the priceless fair woman
+living under their roof, a contrast of very life, with the corpse and
+shroud; and she seen by him daily, singing with him, her breath about
+him, her voice incessantly upon every chord of his being!
+
+He pleaded successfully.  But the silence following the verdict was
+heavy; the silence contained an unheard thunder.  It was the sound, as
+when out of Court the public is dissatisfied with a verdict.  Are we
+expected to commit a social outrage in exposing our whole case to the
+public?--Imagine it for a moment as done.  Men are ours at a word--or at
+least a word of invitation.  Women we woo; fluent smooth versions of our
+tortures, mixed with permissible courtship, win the individual woman.
+And that unreasoning collective woman, icy, deadly, condemns the poor
+racked wretch who so much as remembers them!  She is the enemy of
+Nature.--Tell us how?  She is the slave of existing conventions.--
+And from what cause?  She is the artificial production of a state that
+exalts her so long as she sacrifices daily and hourly to the artificial.
+
+Therefore she sides with Mrs. Burman--the foe of Nature: who, with her
+arts and gold lures, has now possession of the Law (the brass idol
+worshipped by the collective) to drive Nature into desolation.
+
+He placed himself to the right of Mrs. Burman, for the world to behold
+the couple: and he lent the world a sigh of disgust.
+
+What he could not do, as in other matters he did, was to rise above the
+situation, in a splendid survey and rapid view of the means of reversing
+it.  He was too social to be a captain of the socially insurgent;
+imagination expired.
+
+But having a courageous Nataly to second him!--how then?  It was the
+succour needed.  Then he would have been ready to teach the world that
+Nature--honest Nature--is more to be prized than Convention: a new Era
+might begin.
+
+The thought was tonic for an instant and illuminated him springingly.  It
+sank, excused for the flaccidity by Nataly's want of common adventurous
+daring.  She had not taken to Lakelands; she was purchasing furniture
+from a flowing purse with a heavy heart--unfeminine, one might say; she
+preferred to live obscurely; she did not, one had to think--but it was
+unjust: and yet the accusation, that she did not cheerfully make a strain
+and spurt on behalf of her child, pressed to be repeated.
+
+These short glimpses at reflection in Victor were like the verberant
+twang of a musical instrument that has had a smart blow, and wails away
+independent of the player's cunning hand.  He would have said, that he
+was more his natural self when the cunning hand played on him, to make
+him praise and uplift his beloved: mightily would it have astonished him
+to contemplate with assured perception in his own person the Nature he
+invoked.  But men invoking Nature, do not find in her the Holy Mother she
+in such case becomes to her daughters, whom she so persecutes.  Men call
+on her for their defence, as a favourable witness: she is a note of their
+rhetoric.  They are not bettered by her sustainment; they have not, as
+women may have, her enaemic aid at a trying hour.  It is not an effort at
+epigram to say, that whom she scourges most she most supports.
+
+An Opera-placard drew his next remark to Fenellan.
+
+'How Wagner seems to have stricken the Italians!  Well, now, the Germans
+have their Emperor to head their armies, and I say that the German
+emperor has done less for their lasting fame and influence than Wagner
+has done.  He has affected the French too; I trace him in Gounod's Romeo
+et Juliette--and we don't gain by it; we have a poor remuneration for the
+melody gone; think of the little shepherd's pipeing in Mireille; and
+there's another in Sapho-delicious.  I held out against Wagner as long as
+I could.  The Italians don't much more than Wagnerize in exchange for the
+loss of melody.  They would be wiser in going back to Pergolese,
+Campagnole.  The Mefistofole was good--of the school of the foreign
+master.  Aida and Otello, no.  I confess to a weakness for the old
+barleysugar of Bellini or a Donizetti-Serenade.  Aren't you seduced by
+cadences?  Never mind Wagner's tap of his paedagogue's baton--a cadence
+catches me still.  Early taste for barley-sugar, perhaps!  There's a
+march in Verdi's Attila and I Lombardi, I declare I'm in military step
+when I hear them, as in the old days, after leaving the Opera.  Fredi
+takes little Mab Mountney to her first Opera to-night.  Enough to make us
+old ones envious!  You remember your first Opera, Fenellan?  Sonnambula,
+with me.  I tell you, it would task the highest poetry--say, require, if
+you like--showing all that's noblest, splendidest, in a young man, to
+describe its effect on me.  I was dreaming of my box at the Opera for a
+year after.  The Huguenots to-night.  Not the best suited for little
+Mabsy; but she'll catch at the Rataplan.  Capital Opera; we used to think
+it the best, before we had Tannhauser and Lohengrin and the
+Meistersinger.'
+
+Victor hinted notes of the Conspiration Scene closing the Third Act of
+the Huguenots.  That sombre Chorus brought Mrs. Burman before him.  He
+drummed the Rataplan, which sent her flying.  The return of a lively
+disposition for dinner and music completed his emancipation from the yoke
+of the baleful creature sitting half her days in the chemist's shop; save
+that a thought of drugs brought the smell, and the smell the picture; she
+threatened to be an apparition at any moment pervading him through his
+nostrils.  He spoke to Fenellan of hunger for dinner, a need for it;
+singular in one whose appetite ran to the stroke of the hour abreast with
+Armandine's kitchen-clock.  Fenellan proposed a glass of sherry and
+bitters at his Club over the way.  He had forgotten a shower of black-
+balls (attributable to the conjurations of old Ate) on a certain past
+day.  Without word of refusal, Victor entered a wine-merchant's office,
+where he was unknown, and stating his wish for bitters and dry sherry,
+presently received the glass, drank, nodded to the administering clerk,
+named the person whom he had obliged and refreshed, and passed out,
+remarking to Fenellan: 'Colney on Clubs!  he's right; they're the
+mediaeval in modern times, our Baron's castles, minus the Baron; dead
+against public life and social duties.  Business excuses my City Clubs;
+but I shall take my name off my Club up West.'
+
+'More like monasteries, with a Committee for Abbot, and Whist for the
+services,' Fenellan said.  'Or tabernacles for the Chosen, and
+Grangousier playing Divinity behind the veil.  Well, they're social.'
+
+'Sectionally social, means anything but social, my friend.  However--and
+the monastery had a bell for the wanderer!  Say, I'm penniless or
+poundless, up and down this walled desert of a street, I feel, I must
+feel, these palaces--if we're Christian, not Jews: not that the Jews
+are uncharitable; they set an: example, in fact .  .  .  .  '
+
+He rambled, amusingly to the complacent hearing of Fenellan, who thought
+of his pursuit of wealth and grand expenditure.
+
+Victor talked as a man having his mind at leaps beyond the subject.
+He was nearing to the Idea he had seized and lost on London Bridge.
+
+The desire for some good news wherewith to inspirit Nataly, withdrew him
+from his ineffectual chase.  He had nought to deliver; on the contrary,
+a meditation concerning her comfort pledged him to concealment which was
+the no step, or passive state, most abhorrent to him.
+
+He snatched at the name of Themison.
+
+With Dr. Themison fast in his grasp, there was a report of progress to be
+made to Nataly; and not at all an empty report.
+
+Themison, then: he leaned on Themison.  The woman's doctor should have an
+influence approaching to authority with her.
+
+Land-values in the developing Colonies, formed his theme of discourse to
+Fenellan: let Banks beware.
+
+Fenellan saw him shudder and rub the back of his head.  'Feel the wind?'
+he said.
+
+Victor answered him with that humane thrill of the deep tones, which at
+times he had: 'No: don't be alarmed; I feel the devil.  If one has wealth
+and a desperate wish, he will speak.  All he does, is to make me more
+charitable to those who give way to him.  I believe in a devil.'
+
+'Horns and tail?'
+
+'Bait and hook.'
+
+'I haven't wealth, and I wish only for dinner,' Fenellan said.
+
+'You know that Armandine is never two minutes late.  By the way, you
+haven't wealth--you have me.'
+
+'And I thank God for you!' said Fenellan, acutely reminiscent of his
+having marked the spiritual adviser of Mrs. Burman, the Rev. Groseman
+Buttermore, as a man who might be useful to his friend.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+DISCLOSES A STAGE ON THE DRIVE TO PARIS
+
+A fortnight later, an extremely disconcerting circumstance occurred:
+Armandine was ten minutes behind the hour with her dinner.  But the
+surprise and stupefaction expressed by Victor, after glances at his
+watch, were not so profound as Fenellan's, on finding himself exchangeing
+the bow with a gentleman bearing the name of Dr. Themison.  His friend's
+rapidity in pushing the combinations he conceived, was known: Fenellan's
+wonder was not so much that Victor had astonished him again, as that he
+should be called upon again to wonder at his astonishment.  He did; and
+he observed the doctor and Victor and Nataly: aided by dropping remarks.
+Before the evening was over, he gathered enough of the facts, and had to
+speculate only on the designs.  Dr. Themison had received a visit from
+the husband of Mrs. Victor Radnor concerning her state of health.  At an
+interview with the lady, laughter greeted him; he was confused by her
+denial of the imputation of a single ailment: but she, to recompose him,
+let it be understood, that she was anxious about her husband's condition,
+he being certainly overworked; and the husband's visit passed for a
+device on the part of the wife.  She admitted a willingness to try a
+change of air, if it was deemed good for her husband.  Change of air was
+prescribed to each for both.  'Why not drive to Paris?' the doctor said,
+and Victor was taken with the phrase.
+
+He told Fenellan at night that Mrs. Burman, he had heard, was by the sea,
+on the South coast.  Which of her maladies might be in the ascendant,
+he did not know.  He knew little.  He fancied that Dr. Themison was
+unsuspicious of the existence of a relationship between him and Mrs.
+Burman: and Fenellan opined, that there had been no communication upon
+private affairs.  What, then, was the object in going to Dr. Themison?
+He treated her body merely; whereas the Rev. Groseman Buttermore could
+be expected to impose upon her conduct.  Fenellan appreciated his own
+discernment of the superior uses to which a spiritual adviser may be put,
+and he too agreeably flattered himself for the corrective reflection to
+ensue, that he had not done anything.  It disposed him to think a happy
+passivity more sagacious than a restless activity.  We should let Fortune
+perform her part at the wheel in working out her ends, should we not?--
+for, ten to one, nine times out of ten we are thwarting her if we stretch
+out a hand.  And with the range of enjoyments possessed by Victor, why
+this unceasing restlessness?  Why, when we are not near drowning, catch
+at apparent straws, which may be instruments having sharp edges?
+Themison, as Mrs. Burman's medical man, might tell the lady tales
+that would irritate her bag of venom.
+
+Rarely though Fenellan was the critic on his friend, the shadow cast over
+his negligent hedonism by Victor's boiling pressure, drove him into the
+seat of judgement.  As a consequence, he was rather a dull table-guest in
+the presence of Dr. Themison, whom their host had pricked to anticipate
+high entertainment from him.  He did nothing to bridge the crevasse and
+warm the glacier air at table when the doctor, anecdotal intentionally to
+draw him out, related a decorous but pungent story of one fair member of
+a sweet new sisterhood in agitation against the fixed establishment of
+our chain-mail marriage-tie.  An anecdote of immediate diversion was
+wanted, expected: and Fenellan sat stupidly speculating upon whether the
+doctor knew of a cupboard locked.  So that Dr. Themison was carried on by
+Lady Grace Halley's humourous enthusiasm for the subject to dilate and
+discuss and specify, all in the irony of a judicial leaning to the side
+of the single-minded social adventurers, under an assumed accord with his
+audience; concluding: 'So there's an end of Divorce.'
+
+'By the trick of multiplication,' Fenellan, now reassured, was content to
+say.  And that did not extinguish the cracker of a theme; handled very
+carefully, as a thing of fire, it need scarce be remarked, three young
+women being present.
+
+Nataly had eyes on her girl, and was pleased at an alertness shown by Mr.
+Sowerby to second her by crossing the dialogue.  As regarded her personal
+feelings, she was hardened, so long as the curtains were about her to
+keep the world from bending black brows of inquisition upon one of its
+culprits.  But her anxiety was vigilant to guard her girl from an
+infusion of any of the dread facts of life not coming through the
+mother's lips: and she was a woman having the feminine mind's pudency
+in that direction, which does not consent to the revealing of much.
+Here was the mother's dilemma: her girl--Victor's girl, as she had to
+think in this instance,--the most cloudless of the young women of earth,
+seemed, and might be figured as really, at the falling of a crumb off the
+table of knowledge, taken by the brain to shoot up to terrific heights of
+surveyal; and there she rocked; and only her youthful healthiness brought
+her down to grass and flowers.  She had once or twice received the
+electrical stimulus, to feel and be as lightning, from a seizure of facts
+in infinitesimal doses, guesses caught off maternal evasions or the
+circuitous explanation of matters touching sex in here and there a
+newspaper, harder to repress completely than sewer-gas in great cities:
+and her mother had seen, with an apprehensive pang of anguish, how
+witheringly the scared young intelligence of the innocent creature
+shocked her sensibility.  She foresaw the need to such a flameful soul,
+as bride, wife, woman across the world, of the very princeliest of men in
+gifts of strength, for her sustainer and guide.  And the provident mother
+knew this peerless gentleman: but he had his wife.
+
+Delusions and the pain of the disillusioning were to be feared for the
+imaginative Nesta; though not so much as that on some future day of a
+perchance miserable yokemating--a subjection or an entanglement--the
+nobler passions might be summoned to rise for freedom, and strike a line
+to make their logically estimable sequence from a source not honourable
+before the public.  Constantly it had to be thought, that the girl was
+her father's child.
+
+At present she had no passions; and her bent to the happiness she could
+so richly give, had drawn her sailing smoothly over the harbour-bar of
+maidenhood; where many of her sisters are disconcerted to the loss of
+simplicity.  If Nataly with her sleepless watchfulness and forecasts
+partook of the French mother, Nesta's Arcadian independence likened her
+somewhat in manner to the Transatlantic version of the English girl.  Her
+high physical animation and the burden of themes it plucked for delivery
+carried her flowing over impediments of virginal self-consciousness, to
+set her at her ease in the talk with men; she had not gone through the
+various Nursery exercises in dissimulation; she had no appearance of
+praying forgiveness of men for the original sin of being woman; and no
+tricks of lips or lids, or traitor scarlet on the cheeks, or assumptions
+of the frigid mask, or indicated reserve-cajoleries.  Neither ignorantly
+nor advisedly did she play on these or other bewitching strings of her
+sex, after the fashion of the stamped innocents, who are the boast of
+Englishmen and matrons, and thrill societies with their winsome
+ingenuousness; and who sometimes when unguarded meet an artful serenader,
+that is a cloaked bandit, and is provoked by their performances, and
+knows anthropologically the nature behind the devious show; a sciential
+rascal; as little to be excluded from our modern circles as Eve's own old
+deuce from Eden's garden whereupon, opportunity inviting, both the fool
+and the cunning, the pure donkey princess of insular eulogy, and the sham
+one, are in a perilous pass.
+
+Damsels of the swiftness of mind of Nesta cannot be ignorant utterly amid
+a world where the hints are hourly scattering seed of the inklings; when
+vileness is not at work up and down our thoroughfares, proclaiming its
+existence with tableau and trumpet.  Nataly encountered her girl's
+questions, much as one seeks to quiet an enemy.  The questions had soon
+ceased.  Excepting repulsive and rejected details, there is little to be
+learnt when a little is known: in populous communities, density only will
+keep the little out.  Only stupidity will suppose that it can be done for
+the livelier young.  English mothers forethoughtful for their girls, have
+to take choice of how to do battle with a rough-and-tumble Old England,
+that lumbers bumping along, craving the precious things, which can be had
+but in semblance under the conditions allowed by laziness to subsist, and
+so curst of its shifty inconsequence as to worship in the concrete an
+hypocrisy it abhors in the abstract.  Nataly could smuggle or confiscate
+here and there a newspaper; she could not interdict or withhold every one
+of them, from a girl ardent to be in the race on all topics of popular
+interest: and the newspapers are occasionally naked savages; the streets
+are imperfectly garmented even by day; and we have our stumbling social
+anecdotist, our spot-mouthed young man, our eminently silly woman; our
+slippery one; our slimy one, the Rahab of Society; not to speak of Mary
+the maid and the footman William.  A vigilant mother has to contend with
+these and the like in an increasing degree.  How best?
+
+There is a method: one that Colney Durance advocated.  The girl's
+intelligence and sweet blood invited a trial of it.  Since, as he argued,
+we cannot keep the poisonous matter out, mothers should prepare and
+strengthen young women for the encounter with it, by lifting the veil,
+baring the world, giving them knowledge to arm them for the fight they
+have to sustain; and thereby preserve them further from the spiritual
+collapse which follows the nursing of a false ideal of our life in
+youth:--this being, Colney said, the prominent feminine disease of the
+time, common to all our women; that is, all having leisure to shine in
+the sun or wave in the wind as flowers of the garden.
+
+Whatever there was of wisdom in his view, he spoilt it for English
+hearing, by making use of his dry compressed sentences.  Besides he was a
+bachelor; therefore but a theorist.  And his illustrations of his theory
+were grotesque; meditation on them extracted a corrosive acid to consume,
+in horrid derision, the sex, the nation, the race of man.  The satirist
+too devotedly loves his lash to be a persuasive teacher.  Nataly had
+excuses to cover her reasons for not listening to him.
+
+One reason was, as she discerned through her confusion at the thought,
+that the day drew near for her speaking fully to Nesta; when, between
+what she then said and what she said now, a cruel contrast might strike
+the girl and in toneing revelations now, to be more consonant with them
+then;--in softening and shading the edges of social misconduct, it seemed
+painfully possible to be sowing in the girl's mind something like the
+reverse of moral precepts, even to smoothing the way to a rebelliousness
+partly or wholly similar to her own.  But Nataly's chief and her
+appeasing reason for pursuing the conventional system with this
+exceptional young creature, referred to the sentiments on that subject
+of the kind of young man whom a mother elects from among those present
+and eligible, as perhaps next to worthy to wed the girl, by virtue of
+good promise in the moral department.  She had Mr. Dudley Sowerby under
+view; far from the man of her choice and still the practice of decorum,
+discretion, a pardonable fastidiousness, appears, if women may make any
+forecast of the behaviour of young men or may trust the faces they see,
+to, promise a future stability in the husband.  Assuredly a Dudley
+Sowerby would be immensely startled to find in his bride a young woman
+more than babily aware of the existence of one particular form of
+naughtiness on earth.
+
+Victor was of no help: he had not an idea upon the right education of the
+young of the sex.  Repression and mystery, he considered wholesome for
+girls; and he considered the enlightening of them--to some extent--a
+prudential measure for their defence; and premature instruction is a
+fire-water to their wild-in-woods understanding; and histrionic innocence
+is no doubt the bloom on corruption; also the facts of current human
+life, in the crude of the reports or the cooked of the sermon in the
+newspapers, are a noxious diet for our daughters; whom nevertheless we
+cannot hope to be feeding always on milk: and there is a time when their
+adorable pretty ignorance, if credibly it exists out of noodledom, is
+harmful:--but how beautiful the shining simplicity of our dear young
+English girls!  He was one of the many men to whose minds women come in
+pictures and are accepted much as they paint themselves.  Like his
+numerous fellows, too, he required a conflict with them, and a worsting
+at it, to be taught, that they are not the mere live stock we scheme to
+dispose of for their good: unless Love should interpose, he would have
+exclaimed.  He broke from his fellows in his holy horror of a father's
+running counter to love.  Nesta had only to say, that she loved another,
+for Dudley Sowerby to be withdrawn into the background of aspirants.
+But love was unknown to the girl.
+
+Outwardly, the plan of the Drive to Paris had the look of Victor's
+traditional hospitality.  Nataly smiled at her incorrigibly lagging
+intelligence of him, on hearing that he had invited a company: 'Lady
+Grace, for gaiety; Peridon and Catkin, fiddles; Dudley Sowerby and
+myself, flutes; Barmby, intonation; in all, nine of us; and by the dear
+old Normandy route, for the sake of the voyage, as in old times; towers
+of Dieppe in the morning-light; and the lovely road to the capital!  Just
+three days in Paris, and home by any of the other routes.  It's the drive
+we want.  Boredom in wet weather, we defy; we have our Concert--an hour
+at night and we're sure of sleep.'  It had a sweet simple air, befitting
+him; as when in bygone days they travelled with the joy of children.
+For travelling shook Nataly out of her troubles and gave her something of
+the child's inheritance of the wisdom of life--the living ever so little
+ahead of ourselves; about as far as the fox in view of the hunt.  That is
+the soul of us out for novelty, devouring as it runs, an endless feast;
+and the body is eagerly after it, recording the pleasures, a daily chase.
+Remembrance of them is almost a renewal, anticipation a revival.  She
+enraptured Victor with glimpses of the domestic fun she had ceased to
+show sign of since the revelation of Lakelands.  Her only regret was on
+account of the exclusion of Colney Durance from the party, because of
+happy memories associating him with the Seine-land, and also that his
+bilious criticism of his countrymen was moderated by a trip to the
+Continent.  Fenellan reported Colney to be 'busy in the act of distilling
+one of his Prussic acid essays.'  Fenellan would have jumped to go.  He
+informed Victor, as a probe, that the business of the Life Insurance was
+at periods 'fearfully necrological!  Inexplicably, he was not invited.
+Did it mean, that he was growing dull?  He looked inside instead of out,
+and lost the clue.
+
+His behaviour on the evening of the departure showed plainly what would
+have befallen Mr. Sowerby on the expedition, had not he as well as Colney
+been excluded.  Two carriages and a cab conveyed the excursionists, as
+they merrily called themselves, to the terminus.  They were Victor's
+guests; they had no trouble, no expense, none of the nipper reckonings
+which dog our pleasures; the state of pure bliss.  Fenellan's enviousness
+drove him at the Rev. Mr. Barmby until the latter jumped to the seat
+beside Nesta in her carriage, Mademoiselle de Seilles and Mr. Sowerby
+facing them.  Lady Grace Halley, in the carriage behind, heard Nesta's
+laugh; which Mr. Barmby had thought vacuous, beseeming little girls, that
+laugh at nothings.  She questioned Fenellan.
+
+'Oh,' said he, 'I merely mentioned that the Rev. gentleman carries his
+musical instrument at the bottom of his trunk.'
+
+She smiled: 'And who are in the cab?'
+
+'Your fiddles are in the cab, in charge of Peridon and Catkin.  Those two
+would have writhed like head and tail of a worm, at a division on the way
+to the station.  Point a finger at Peridon, you run Catkin through the
+body.  They're a fabulous couple.'
+
+Victor cut him short.  'I deny that those two are absurd.'
+
+'And Catkin's toothache is a galvanic battery upon Peridon.'
+
+Nataly strongly denied it.  Peridon and Catkin pertained to their genial
+picture of the dear sweet nest in life; a dale never traversed by the
+withering breath they dreaded.
+
+Fenellan then, to prove that he could be as bad in his way as Colney,
+fell to work on the absent Miss Priscilla Graves and Mr. Pempton, with a
+pitchfork's exaltation of the sacred attachment of the divergently
+meritorious couple, and a melancholy reference to implacable obstacles in
+the principles of each.  The pair were offending the amatory corner in
+the generous good sense of Nataly and Victor; they were not to be hotly
+protected, though they were well enough liked for their qualities, except
+by Lady Grace, who revelled in the horrifying and scandalizing of Miss
+Graves.  Such a specimen of the Puritan middle English as Priscilla
+Graves, was eastwind on her skin, nausea to her gorge.  She wondered at
+having drifted into the neighbourhood of a person resembling in her
+repellent formal chill virtuousness a windy belfry tower, down among
+those districts of suburban London or appalling provincial towns passed
+now and then with a shudder, where the funereal square bricks-up the
+Church, that Arctic hen-mother sits on the square, and the moving dead
+are summoned to their round of penitential exercise by a monosyllabic
+tribulation-bell.  Fenellan's graphic sketch of the teetotaller woman
+seeing her admirer pursued by Eumenides flagons--abominations of
+emptiness--to the banks of the black river of suicides, where the one
+most wretched light is Inebriation's nose; and of the vegetarian
+violoncello's horror at his vision of the long procession of the flocks
+and herds into his lady's melodious Ark of a mouth, excited and delighted
+her antipathy.  She was amused to transports at the station, on hearing
+Mr. Barmby, in a voice all ophicleide, remark: 'No, I carry no
+instrument.'  The habitation of it at the bottom of his trunk, was not
+forgotten when it sounded.
+
+Reclining in warmth on the deck of the vessel at night, she said, just
+under Victor's ear: 'Where are those two?'
+
+'Bid me select the couple,' said he.
+
+She rejoined: 'Silly man'; and sleepily gave him her hand for good night,
+and so paralyzed his arm, that he had to cover the continued junction by
+saying more than he intended: 'If they come to an understanding!'
+
+'Plain enough on one side.'
+
+'You think it suitable?'
+
+'Perfection; and well-planned to let them discover it.'  'This is really
+my favourite route; I love the saltwater and the night on deck.'
+
+'Go on.'
+
+'How?'
+
+'Number your loves.  It would tax your arithmetic.'
+
+'I can hate.'
+
+'Not me?'
+
+Positively the contrary, an impulsive squeeze of fingers declared it;
+and they broke the link, neither of them sensibly hurt; though a leaf
+or two of the ingenuities, which were her thoughts, turned over in the
+phantasies of the lady; and the gentleman was taught to feel that a never
+so slightly lengthened compression of the hand female shoots within us
+both straight and far and round the corners.  There you have Nature, if
+you want her naked in her elements, for a text.  He loved his Nataly
+truly, even fervently, after the twenty years of union; he looked about
+at no other woman; it happened only that the touch of one, the chance
+warm touch, put to motion the blind forces of our mother so remarkably
+surcharging him.  But it was without kindling.  The lady, the much cooler
+person, did nurse a bit of flame.  She had a whimsical liking for the man
+who enjoyed simple things when commanding the luxuries; and it became a
+fascination, by extreme contrast, at the reminder of his adventurous
+enterprises in progress while he could so childishly enjoy.  Women who
+dance with the warrior-winner of battles, and hear him talk his ball-room
+trifles to amuse, have similarly a smell of gunpowder to intoxicate them.
+
+For him, a turn on the deck brought him into new skies.  Nataly lay in
+the cabin.  She used to be where Lady Grace was lying.  A sort of
+pleadable, transparent, harmless hallucination of the renewal of old
+service induced him to refresh and settle the fair semi-slumberer's
+pillow, and fix the tarpaulin over her silks and wraps; and bend his head
+to the soft mouth murmuring thanks.  The women who can dare the nuit
+blanche, and under stars; and have a taste for holiday larks after their
+thirtieth, are rare; they are precious.  Nataly nevertheless was approved
+for guarding her throat from the nightwind.  And a softer southerly
+breath never crossed Channel!  The very breeze he had wished for!  Luck
+was with him.
+
+Nesta sat by the rails of the vessel beside her Louise.  Mr. Sowerby in
+passing, exchanged a description of printed agreement with her, upon the
+beauty of the night--a good neutral topic for the encounter of the sexes
+not that he wanted it neutral; it furnished him with a vocabulary.  Once
+he perceptibly washed his hands of dutiful politeness, in addressing
+Mademoiselle de Seilles, likewise upon the beauty of the night; and the
+French lady, thinking--too conclusively from the breath on the glass at
+the moment, as it is the Gallic habit--that if her dear Nesta must
+espouse one of the uninteresting creatures called men in her native land,
+it might as well be this as another, agreed that the night was very
+beautiful.
+
+'He speaks grammatical French,' Nesta commented on his achievement.
+'He contrives in his walking not to wet his boots,' mademoiselle
+rejoined.
+
+Mr. Peridon was a more welcome sample of the islanders, despite an
+inferior pretension to accent.  He burned to be near these ladies, and
+he passed them but once.  His enthusiasm for Mademoiselle de Seilles was
+notorious.  Gratefully the compliment was acknowledged by her, in her
+demure fashion; with a reserve of comic intellectual contempt for the man
+who could not see that women, or Frenchwomen, or eminently she among
+them, must have their enthusiasm set springing in the breast before they
+can be swayed by the most violent of outer gales.  And say, that she is
+uprooted;--he does but roll a log.  Mr. Peridon's efforts to perfect
+himself in the French tongue touched her.
+
+A night of May leaning on June, is little more than a deliberate wink of
+the eye of light.  Mr. Barmby, an exile from the ladies by reason of an
+addiction to tobacco, quitted the forepart of the vessel at the first
+greying.  Now was the cloak of night worn threadbare, and grey astir for
+the heralding of gold, day visibly ready to show its warmer throbs.
+The gentle waves were just a stronger grey than the sky, perforce of an
+interfusion that shifted gradations; they were silken, in places oily
+grey; cold to drive the sight across their playful monotonousness for
+refuge on any far fisher-sail.
+
+Miss Radnor was asleep, eyelids benignly down, lips mildly closed.
+The girl's cheeks held colour to match a dawn yet unawakened though born.
+They were in a nest shading amid silks of pale blue, and there was a
+languid flutter beneath her chin to the catch of the morn-breeze.
+Bacchanal threads astray from a disorderly front-lock of rich brown hair
+were alive over an eyebrow showing like a seal upon the lightest and
+securest of slumbers.
+
+Mr. Barmby gazed, and devoutly.  Both the ladies were in their oblivion;
+the younger quite saintly; but the couple inseparably framed, elevating
+to behold; a reproach to the reminiscence of pipes.  He was near; and
+quietly the eyelids of mademoiselle lifted on him.  Her look was grave,
+straight, uninquiring, soon accurately perusing; an arrow of Artemis for
+penetration.  He went by, with the sound in the throat of a startled
+bush-bird taking to wing; he limped off some nail of the deck, as if that
+young Frenchwoman had turned the foot to a hoof.  Man could not be more
+guiltless, yet her look had perturbed him; nails conspired; in his
+vexation, he execrated tobacco.  And ask not why, where reason never was.
+
+Nesta woke babbling on the subject she had relinquished for sleep.
+Mademoiselle touched a feathery finger at her hair and hood during their
+silvery French chimes.
+
+Mr. Sowerby presented the risen morning to them, with encomiums, after
+they had been observing every variation in it.  He spoke happily of the
+pleasant passage, and of the agreeable night; particularly of the
+excellent idea of the expedition by this long route at night; the
+prospect of which had disfigured him with his grimace of speculation--
+apparently a sourness that did not exist.  Nesta had a singular notion,
+coming of a girl's mingled observation and intuition, that the
+impressions upon this gentleman were in arrear, did not strike him till
+late.  Mademoiselle confirmed it when it was mentioned; she remembered to
+have noticed the same in many small things.  And it was a pointed
+perception.
+
+Victor sent his girl down to Nataly, with a summons to hurry up and see
+sunlight over the waters.  Nataly came; she looked, and the outer wakened
+the inner, she let the light look in on her, her old feelings danced to
+her eyes like a, string of bubbles in ascent.  'Victor, Victor, it seems
+only yesterday that we crossed, twelve years back--was it?--and in May,
+and saw the shoal of porpoises, and five minutes after, Dieppe in view.
+Dear French people!  I share your love for France.'
+
+'Home of our holidays!--the "drives"; and they may be the happiest.
+And fifty minutes later we were off the harbour; and Natata landed, a
+stranger; and at night she was the heroine of the town.'
+
+Victor turned to a stately gentleman and passed his name to Nataly: 'Sir
+Rodwell Balchington, a neighbour of Lakelands!  She understood that Lady
+Grace Halley was acquainted with Sir Rodwell:--hence this dash of brine
+to her lips while she was drinking of happy memories, and Victor
+evidently was pluming himself upon his usual luck in the fortuitous
+encounter with an influential neighbour of Lakelands.  He told Sir
+Rodwell the story of how they had met in the salle a manger of the hotel
+the impresario of a Concert in the town, who had in his hand the doctor's
+certificate of the incapacity of the chief cantatrice to appear, and
+waved it, within a step of suicide.  'Well, to be brief, my wife--"noble
+dame Anglaise," as the man announced her on the Concert platform,
+undertook one of the songs, and sang another of her own-pure contralto
+voice, as you will say; with the result that there was a perfect tumult
+of enthusiasm.  Next day, the waiters of the hotel presented her with a
+bouquet of Spring flowers, white, and central violets.  It was in the
+Paris papers, under the heading: Une amie d'outre Manche--I think that
+was it?' he asked Nataly.
+
+'I forget,' said she.
+
+He glanced at her: a cloud had risen.  He rallied her, spoke of the old
+Norman silver cross which the manager of the Concert had sent, humbly
+imploring her to accept the small memento of his gratitude.  She nodded
+an excellent artificial brightness.
+
+And there was the coast of France under young sunlight over the waters.
+Once more her oft-petitioning wish through the years, that she had
+entered the ranks of professional singers, upon whom the moral scrutiny
+is not so microscopic, invaded her, resembling a tide-swell into rock-
+caves, which have been filled before and left to emptiness, and will be
+left to emptiness again.  Nataly had the intimation visiting us when,
+in a decline of physical power, the mind's ready vivacity to conjure
+illusions forsakes us; and it was, of a wall ahead, and a force impelling
+her against it, and no hope of deviation.  And this is the featureless
+thing, Destiny; not without eyes, if we have a conscience to throw them
+into it to look at us.
+
+Counsel to her to live in the hour, came, as upon others on the vessel,
+from an active breath of the salt prompting to healthy hunger; and hardly
+less from the splendour of the low full sunlight on the waters, the
+skimming and dancing of the thousands of golden shells away from under
+the globe of fire.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+A PATRIOT ABROAD
+
+Nine days after his master's departure, Daniel Skepsey, a man of some
+renown of late, as a subject of reports and comments in the newspapers,
+obtained a passport, for the identification, if need were, of his missing
+or misapprehended person in a foreign country, of the language of which
+three unpronounceable words were knocking about his head to render the
+thought of the passport a staff of safety; and on the morning that
+followed he was at speed through Normandy, to meet his master rounding
+homeward from Paris, at a town not to be spoken as it is written, by
+reason of the custom of the good people of the country, with whom we
+would fain live on neighbourly terms:--yes, and they had proof of it,
+not so very many years back, when they were enduring the worst which can
+befall us--though Mr. Durance, to whom he was indebted for the writing of
+the place of his destination large on a card, and the wording of the
+French sound beside it, besides the jotting down of trains and the
+station for the change of railways, Mr. Durance could say, that the
+active form of our sympathy consisted in the pouring of cheeses upon
+them when they were prostrate and unable to resist!
+
+A kind gentleman, Mr. Durance, as Daniel Skepsey had recent cause to
+know, but often exceedingly dark; not so patriotic as desireable, it was
+to be feared; and yet, strangely indeed, Mr. Durance had said cogent
+things on the art of boxing and on manly exercises, and he hoped--he was
+emphatic in saying he hoped--we should be regenerated.  He must have
+meant, that boxing--on a grand scale would contribute to it.  He said,
+that a blow now and then was wholesome for us all.  He recommended a
+monthly private whipping for old gentlemen who decline the use of the
+gloves, to disperse their humours; not excluding Judges and Magistrates:
+he could hardly be in earnest.  He spoke in a clergyman's voice, and said
+it would be payment of good assurance money, beneficial to their souls:
+he seemed to mean it.  He said, that old gentlemen were bottled vapours,
+and it was good for them to uncork them periodically.  He said, they
+should be excused half the strokes if they danced nightly--they resented
+motion.  He seemed sadly wanting in veneration.
+
+But he might not positively intend what he said.  Skepsey could overlook
+everything he said, except the girding at England.  For where is a braver
+people, notwithstanding appearances!  Skepsey knew of dozens of gallant
+bruisers, ready for the cry to strip to the belt; worthy, with a little
+public encouragement, to rank beside their grandfathers of the Ring, in
+the brilliant times when royalty and nobility countenanced the manly art,
+our nursery of heroes, and there was not the existing unhappy division of
+classes.  He still trusted to convince Mr. Durance, by means of argument
+and happy instances, historical and immediate, that the English may
+justly consider themselves the elect of nations, for reasons better than
+their accumulation of the piles of gold-better than 'usurers' reasons,'
+as Mr. Durance called them.  Much that Mr. Durance had said at intervals
+was, although remembered almost to the letter of the phrase, beyond his
+comprehension, and he put it aside, with penitent blinking at his
+deficiency.
+
+All the while, he was hearing a rattle of voluble tongues around him, and
+a shout of stations, intelligible as a wash of pebbles, and blocks in a
+torrent.  Generally the men slouched when they were not running.  At
+Dieppe he had noticed muscular fellows; he admitted them to be nimbler on
+the legs than ours; and that may count both ways, he consoled a patriotic
+vanity by thinking; instantly rebuking the thought; for he had read
+chapters of Military History.  He sat eyeing the front row of figures in
+his third-class carriage, musing on the kind of soldiers we might, heaven
+designing it, have to face, and how to beat them; until he gazed on
+Rouen, knowing by the size of it and by what Mr. Durance had informed him
+of the city on the river, that it must be the very city of Rouen, not so
+many years back a violated place, at the mercy of a foreign foe.  Strong
+pity laid hold of Skepsey.  He fortified the heights for defence, but saw
+at a glance that it was the city for modern artillery to command, crush
+and enter.  He lost idea of these afflicted people as foes, merely
+complaining of their attacks on England, and their menaces in their
+Journals and pamphlets; and he renounced certain views of the country to
+be marched over on the road by this route to Paris, for the dictation of
+terms of peace at the gates of the French capital, sparing them the
+shameful entry; and this after the rout of their attempt at an invasion
+of the Island!
+
+A man opposite him was looking amicably on his lively grey eyes.  Skepsey
+handed a card from his pocket.  The man perused it, and crying: 'Dreux?'
+waved out of the carriage-window at a westerly distance, naming Rouen as
+not the place, not at all, totally other.  Thus we are taught, that a
+foreign General, ignorant of the language, must confine himself to
+defensive operations at home; he would be a child in the hands of the
+commonest man he meets.  Brilliant with thanks in signs, Skepsey drew
+from his friend a course of instruction in French names, for our
+necessities on a line of march.  The roads to Great Britain's metropolis,
+and the supplies of forage and provision at every stage of a march on
+London, are marked in the military offices of these people; and that,
+with their barking Journals, is a piece of knowledge to justify a
+belligerent return for it.  Only we pray to be let live peacefully.
+
+Fervently we pray it when this good man, a total stranger to us, conducts
+an ignorant foreigner from one station to another through the streets of
+Rouen, after a short stoppage at the buffet and assistance in the
+identification of coins; then, lifting his cap to us, retires.
+
+And why be dealing wounds and death?  It is a more blessed thing to keep
+the Commandments.  But how is it possible to keep the Commandments if you
+have a vexatious wife?
+
+Martha Skepsey had given him a son to show the hereditary energy in his
+crying and coughing; and it was owing, he could plead, to her habits and
+her tongue, that he sometimes, that he might avoid the doing of worse--
+for she wanted correction and was improved by it--courted the excitement
+of a short exhibition of skill, man to man, on publicans' first floors.
+He could have told the magistrates so, in part apology for the
+circumstances dragging him the other day, so recently, before his
+Worship; and he might have told it, if he had not remembered Captain
+Dartrey Fenellan's words about treating women chivalrously which was
+interpreted by Skepsey as correcting them, when called upon to do it,
+but never exposing them only, if allowed to account for the circumstances
+pushing us into the newspapers, we should not present so guilty a look
+before the public.
+
+Furthermore, as to how far it is the duty of a man to serve his master,
+there is likewise question: whether is he, while receiving reproof and
+punishment for excess of zeal in the service of his master, not to
+mention the welfare of the country, morally--without establishing it as a
+principle--exonerated?  Miss Graves might be asked save that one would
+not voluntarily trouble a lady on such subjects.  But supposing, says the
+opposing counsel, now at work in Skepsey's conscience, supposing this
+act, for which, contraveneing the law of the land, you are reproved and
+punished, to be agreeable to you, how then?  We answer, supposing it--and
+we take uncomplainingly the magistrate's reproof and punishment--morally
+justified can it be expected of us to have the sense of guilt, although
+we wear and know we wear a guilty look before the public?
+
+His master and the dear ladies would hear of it; perhaps they knew of it
+now; with them would rest the settlement of the distressing inquiry.  The
+ladies would be shocked ladies cannot bear any semblance of roughness,
+not even with the gloves:--and knowing, as they must, that our practise
+of the manly art is for their protection.
+
+Skepsey's grievous prospect of the hour to come under judgement of a sex
+that was ever a riddle unread, clouded him on the approach to Dreux.  He
+studied the country and the people eagerly; he forbore to conduct great
+military operations.  Mr. Durance had spoken of big battles round about
+the town of Dreux; also of a wonderful Mausoleum there, not equally
+interesting.  The little man was in deeper gloom than a day sobering on
+crimson dusk when the train stopped and his quick ear caught the sound of
+the station, as pronounced by his friend at Rouen.
+
+He handed his card to the station-master.  A glance, and the latter
+signalled to a porter, saying: 'Paradis'; and the porter laid hold of
+Skepsey's bag.  Skepsey's grasp was firm; he pulled, the porter pulled.
+Skepsey heard explanatory speech accompanying a wrench.  He wrenched back
+with vigour, and in his own tongue exclaimed, that he held to the bag
+because his master's letters were in the bag, all the way from England.
+For a minute, there was a downright trial of muscle and will: the porter
+appeared furiously excited, Skepsey had a look of cooled steel.  Then the
+Frenchman, requiring to shrug, gave way to the Englishman's eccentric
+obstinacy, and signified that he was his guide.  Quite so, and Skepsey
+showed alacrity and confidence in following; he carried his bag.  But
+with the remembrance of the kindly serviceable man at Rouen, he sought to
+convey to the porter, that the terms of their association were cordial.
+A waving of the right hand to the heavens ratified the treaty on the
+French side.  Nods and smiles and gesticulations, with across-Channel
+vocables, as it were Dover cliffs to Calais sands and back, pleasantly
+beguiled the way down to the Hotel du Paradis, under the Mausoleum
+heights, where Skepsey fumbled at his pocket for coin current; but the
+Frenchman, all shaken by a tornado of negation, clapped him on the
+shoulder, and sang him a quatrain.  Skepsey had in politeness to stand
+listening, and blinking, plunged in the contrition of ignorance,
+eclipsed.  He took it to signify something to the effect, that money
+should not pass between friends.  It was the amatory farewell address of
+Henri IV. to his Charmante Gabrielle; and with
+
+                        'Perce de mille lords,
+                         L'honneur m'appelle
+                         Au champ de Mars,'
+
+the Frenchman, in a backing of measured steps, apologized for his
+enforced withdrawal from the stranger who had captured his heart.
+
+Skepsey's card was taken in the passage of the hotel.  A clean-capped
+maid, brave on the legs, like all he had seen of these people, preceded
+him at quick march to an upper chamber.  When he descended, bag in hand,
+she flung open the salon-door of a table d'hote, where a goodly number
+were dining and chattering; waiters drew him along to the section
+occupied by his master's party.  A chair had been kept vacant for him;
+his master waved a hand, his dear ladies graciously smiled; he struck the
+bag in front of a guardian foot, growing happy.  He could fancy they had
+not seen the English newspapers.  And his next observation of the table
+showed him wrecked and lost: Miss Nesta's face was the oval of a woeful O
+at his wild behaviour in England during their absence.  She smiled.
+Skepsey had nevertheless to consume his food--excellent, very tasty soup-
+with the sour sauce of the thought that he must be tongue-tied in his
+defence for the time of the dinner.
+
+'No, dear Skips, please! you are to enjoy yourself,' said Nesta.
+
+He answered confusedly, trying to assure her that he was doing so,
+and he choked.
+
+His master had fixed his arrival for twenty minutes earlier.  Skepsey
+spoke through a cough of long delays at stations.  The Rev. Septimus
+Barmby, officially peacemaker, sounded the consequent excuse for a
+belated comer.  It was final; such is the power of sound.  Looks were
+cast from the French section of the table at the owner of the prodigious
+organ.  Some of the younger men, intent on the charms of Albion's
+daughters, expressed in a, sign and a word or two alarm at what might be
+beneath the flooring: and 'Pas encore Lui!' and 'Son avant-courrier!' and
+other flies of speech passed on a whiff, under politest of cover, not to
+give offence.  But prodigies, claim attention.
+
+Our English, at the close of the dinner, consented to say it was good,
+without specifying a dish, because a selection of this or that would have
+seemed to italicize, and commit, them, in the presence of ladies, to a
+notice of the matter of-course, beneath us, or the confession of a low
+sensual enjoyment; until Lady Grace Halley named the particular dressing
+of a tete de veau approvingly to Victor; and he stating, that he had
+offered a suggestion for the menu of the day, Nataly exclaimed, that she
+had suspected it: upon which Mr. Sowerby praised the menu, Mr. Barmby,
+Peridon and Catkin named other dishes, there was the right after-dinner
+ring in Victor's ears, thanks to the woman of the world who had travelled
+round to nature and led the shackled men to deliver themselves heartily.
+One tap, and they are free.  That is, in the moments after dinner, when
+nature is at the gates with them.  Only, it must be a lady and a
+prevailing lady to give the tap.  They need (our English) and will for
+the ages of the process of their transformation need a queen.
+
+Skepsey, bag in hand, obeyed the motion of his master's head and followed
+him.
+
+He was presently back, to remain with the ladies during his master's
+perusal of letters.  Nataly had decreed that he was not to be troubled;
+so Nesta and mademoiselle besought him for a recital of his French
+adventures; and strange to say, he had nothing to tell.  The journey,
+pregnant at the start, exciting in the course of it, was absolutely blank
+at the termination.  French people had been very kind; he could not say
+more.  But there was more; there was a remarkable fulness, if only he
+could subordinate it to narrative.  The little man did not know, that
+time was wanted for imagination to make the roadway or riverway of a true
+story, unless we press to invent; his mind had been too busy on the way
+for him to clothe in speech his impressions of the passage of incidents
+at the call for them.  Things had happened, numbers of interesting minor
+things, but they all slipped as water through the fingers; and he being
+of the band of honest creatures who will not accept a lift from fiction,
+drearily he sat before the ladies, confessing to an emptiness he was far
+from feeling.
+
+Nesta professed excessive disappointment.  'Now, if it had been in
+England, Skips!' she said, under her mother's gentle gloom of brows.
+
+He made show of melancholy submission.
+
+'There, Skepsey, you have a good excuse, we are sure,' Nataly said.
+
+And women, when they are such ladies as these, are sent to prove to us
+that they can be a blessing; instead of the dreadful cry to Providence
+for the reason of the spread of the race of man by their means!  He
+declared his readiness, rejecting excuses, to state his case to them, but
+for his fear of having it interpreted as an appeal for their kind aid in
+obtaining his master's forgiveness.  Mr. Durance had very considerately
+promised to intercede.  Skepsey dropped a hint or two of his naughty
+proceedings drily aware that their untutored antipathy to the manly art
+would not permit of warmth.
+
+Nesta said: 'Do you know, Skips, we saw a grand exhibition of fencing in
+Paris.'
+
+He sighed.  'Ladies can look on at fencing!  foils and masks!  Captain
+Dartrey Fenellan has shown me, and says, the French are our masters at
+it.'  He bowed constrainedly to mademoiselle.
+
+'You box, M. Skepsey!' she said.
+
+His melancholy increased: 'Much discouragement from Government, Society!
+If ladies .  .  .  but I do not venture.  They are not against Games.
+But these are not a protection .  .  .  to them, when needed; to the
+country.  The country seems asleep to its position.  Mr. Durance has
+remarked on it:--though I would not always quote Mr. Durance .  .  .
+indeed, he says, that England has invested an Old Maid's All in the
+Millennium, and is ruined if it delays to come.  "Old Maid," I do not
+see.  I do not--if I may presume to speak of myself in the same breath
+with so clever a gentleman, agree with Mr. Durance in everything.  But
+the chest-measurement of recruits, the stature of the men enlisted, prove
+that we are losing the nursery of our soldiers.'
+
+'We are taking them out of the nursery, Skips, if you 're for quoting
+Captain Dartrey,' said Nesta.  'We'll never haul down our flag, though,
+while we have him!'
+
+'Ah!  Captain Dartrey!' Skepsey was refreshed by the invocation of the
+name.
+
+A summons to his master's presence cut short something he was beginning
+to say about Captain Dartrey.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+ACCOUNTS FOR SKEPSEY'S MISCONDUCT, SHOWING HOW IT AFFECTED NATALY
+
+His master opened on the bristling business.
+
+'What's this, of your name in the papers, your appearing before a
+magistrate, and a fine?  Tell the tale shortly.'
+
+Skepsey fell upon his attitude for dialectical defence the modest form of
+the two hands at rolling play and the head deferentially sidecast.  But
+knowing that he had gratified his personal tastes in the act of serving
+his master's interests, an interfusion of sentiments plunged him into
+self-consciousness; an unwonted state with him, clogging to a simple
+story.
+
+'First, sir, I would beg you to pardon the printing of your name beside
+mine .  .  .'
+
+'Tush: on with you.'
+
+'Only to say, necessitated by the circumstances of the case.  I read,
+that there was laughter in the court at my exculpation of my conduct--
+as I have to call it; and there may have been.  I may have expressed
+myself .  .  .  .  I have a strong feeling for the welfare of the
+country.'
+
+'So, it seems, you said to the magistrate.  Do you tell me, that the
+cause of your gross breach of the law, was a consideration for the
+welfare of the country?  Run on the facts.'
+
+'The facts--I must have begun badly, sir.'  Skepsey rattled the dry facts
+in his head to right them.  From his not having begun well, they had
+become dry as things underfoot.  It was an error to have led off with the
+sentiments.  'Two very, two very respectable persons--respectable--were
+desirous to witness a short display of my, my system, I would say; of my
+science, they call it.'
+
+'Don't be nervous.  To the point; you went into a field five miles out of
+London, in broad day, and stood in a ring, the usual Tiff-raff about
+you!'
+
+'With the gloves: and not for money, Sir: for the trial of skill; not
+very many people.  I cannot quite see the breach of the law.'
+
+'So you told the magistrate.  You were fined for your inability to quite
+see.  And you had to give security.'
+
+'Mr. Durance was kindly responsible for me, sir: an acquaintance of the
+magistrate.'
+
+'This boxing of yours is a positive mania, Skepsey.  You must try to get
+the better of it--must!  And my name too!  I'm to be proclaimed, as
+having in my service an inveterate pugilist--who breaks the law from
+patriotism!  Male or female, these very respectable persons--the people
+your show was meant for?'
+
+'Male, sir.  Females!  .  .  .  that is, not the respectable ones.'
+
+'Take the opinion of the respectable ones for your standard of behaviour
+in future.'
+
+'It was a mere trial of skill, sir, to prove to one of the spectators,
+that I could be as good as my word.  I wished I may say, to conciliate
+him, partly.  He would not--he judged by size--credit me with .  .  .
+he backed my adversary Jerry Scroom--a sturdy boxer, without the
+knowledge of the first principles.'
+
+'You beat him?'
+
+'I think I taught the man that I could instruct, sir; he was
+complimentary before we parted.  He thought I could not have lasted.
+After the second round, the police appeared.'
+
+'And you ran!'
+
+'No, sir; I had nothing on my conscience.'
+
+'Why not have had your pugilistic display in a publican's room in town,
+where you could have hammer-nailed and ding-donged to your heart's
+content for as long as you liked!'
+
+'That would have been preferable, from the point of view of safety from
+intrusion, I can admit-speaking humbly.  But one of the parties--I had a
+wish to gratify him--is a lover of old English times and habits and our
+country scenes.  He wanted it to take place on green grass.  We drove
+over Hampstead in three carts and a gig, as a company of pleasure--as it
+was.  A very beautiful morning.  There was a rest at a public-house.  Mr.
+Shaplow traces the misfortune to that.  Mr. Jarniman, I hear, thinks it
+what he calls a traitor in the camp.  I saw no sign; we were all merry
+and friendly.'
+
+'Jarniman?' said Victor sharply.  'Who is the Jarniman?'
+
+'Mr. Jarniman is, I am to understand from the acquaintance introducing
+us--a Mr. Shaplow I met in the train from Lakelands one day, and again at
+the corner of a street near Drury Lane, a ham and beef shop kept by a
+Mrs. Jarniman, a very stout lady, who does the chief carving in the shop,
+and is the mother of Mr. Jarniman: he is in a confidential place, highly
+trusted.'  Skepsey looked up from the hands he soaped: 'He is a curious
+mixture; he has true enthusiasm for boxing, he believes in ghosts.  He
+mourns for the lost days of prize-fighting, he thinks that spectres are
+on the increase.  He has a very large appetite, depressed spirits.  Mr.
+Shaplow informs me he is a man of substance, in the service of a wealthy
+lady in poor health, expecting a legacy and her appearance to him.  He
+has the look--Mr. Shaplow assures me he does not drink to excess: he is a
+slow drinker.'
+
+Victor straightened: 'Bad way of health, you said?'
+
+'Mr. Jarniman spoke of his expectations, as being immediate: he put it,
+that he expected her spirit to be out for him to meet it any day--or
+night.  He desires it.  He says, she has promised it--on oath, he says,
+and must feel that she must do her duty to him before she goes, if she is
+to appear to him with any countenance after.  But he is anxious for her
+in any case to show herself, and says, he should not have the heart to
+reproach her.  He has principles, a tear for suffering; he likes to be
+made to cry.  Mrs. Jarniman, his mother, he is not married, is much the
+same so far, except ghosts; she will not have them; except after strong
+tea, they come, she says, come to her bed.  She is foolish enough to
+sleep in a close-curtained bed.  But the poor lady is so exceedingly
+stout that a puff of cold would carry her off, she fears.'
+
+Victor stamped his foot.  'This man Jarniman serves a lady now in a--
+serious, does he say?  Was he precise?'
+
+'Mr. Jarniman spoke of a remarkable number of diseases; very complicated,
+he says.  He has no opinion of doctors.  He says, that the lady's doctor
+and the chemist--she sits in a chemist's shop and swallows other people's
+prescriptions that take her fancy.  He says, her continuing to live is
+wonderful.  He has no reason to hurry her, only for the satisfaction of a
+natural curiosity.'
+
+'He mentioned her name?'
+
+'No name, sir.'
+
+Skepsey's limpid grey eyes confirmed the negative to Victor, who was
+assured that the little man stood clean of any falsity.
+
+'You are not on equal terms.  You and the magistrate have helped him to
+know who it is you serve, Skepsey.'
+
+'Would you please to direct me, sir.'
+
+'Another time.  Now go and ease your feet with a run over the town.  We
+have music in half an hour.  That you like, I know.  See chiefly to
+amusing yourself.'
+
+Skepsey turned to go; he murmured, that he had enjoyed his trip.
+
+Victor checked him: it was to ask whether this Jarniman had specified
+one, any one of the numerous diseases afflicting his aged mistress.
+
+Now Jarniman had shocked Skepsey with his blunt titles for a couple of
+the foremost maladies assailing the poor lady's decayed constitution: not
+to be mentioned, Skepsey's thought, in relation to ladies; whose organs
+and functions we, who pay them a proper homage by restricting them to the
+sphere so worthily occupied by their mothers up to the very oldest date,
+respectfully curtain; their accepted masters are chivalrous to them,
+deploring their need at times for the doctors and drugs.  He stood
+looking most unhappy.  'She was to appear, sir, in a few--perhaps a week,
+a month.'
+
+A nod dismissed him.
+
+The fun of the expedition (and Dudley Sowerby had wound himself up to
+relish it) was at night in the towns, when the sound of instrumental and
+vocal music attracted crowds beneath the windows of the hotel, and they
+heard zon, zon, violon, fete et basse; not bad fluting, excellent
+fiddling, such singing as a maestro, conducting his own Opera, would have
+approved.  So Victor said of his darlings' voices.  Nesta's and her
+mother's were a perfect combination; Mr. Barmby's trompe in union,
+sufficiently confirmed the popular impression, that they were artistes.
+They had been ceremoniously ushered to their carriages, with expressions
+of gratitude, at the departure from Rouen; and the Boniface at Gisors had
+entreated them to stay another night, to give an entertainment.  Victor
+took his pleasure in letting it be known, that they were a quiet English
+family, simply keeping-up the habits they practiced in Old England: all
+were welcome to hear them while they were doing it; but they did not give
+entertainments.
+
+The pride of the pleasure of reversing the general idea of English
+dulness among our neighbours, was perceived to have laid fast hold of
+Dudley Sowerby at Dreux.  He was at the window from time to time,
+counting heads below.  For this reason or a better, he begged Nesta to
+supplant the flute duet with the soprano and contralto of the Helena
+section of the Mefistofele, called the Serenade: La Luna immobile.  She
+consulted her mother, and they sang it.  The crowds below, swollen to a
+block of the street, were dead still, showing the instinctive good
+manners of the people.  Then mademoiselle astonished them with a
+Provencal or Cevennes air, Huguenot, though she was Catholic; but it
+suited her mezzo-soprano tones; and it rang massively of the martial-
+religious.  To what heights of spiritual grandeur might not a Huguenot
+France have marched!  Dudley Sowerby, heedlessly, under an emotion that
+could be stirred in him with force, by the soul of religion issuing
+through music, addressed his ejaculation to Lady Grace Halley.  She did
+nor shrug or snub him, but rejoined: 'I could go to battle with that song
+in the ears.'  She liked seeing him so happily transformed; and liked the
+effect of it on Nesta when his face shone in talking.  He was at home
+with the girl's eyes, as he had never been.  A song expressing in one of
+the combative and devotional, went to the springs of his blood; for he
+was of an old warrior race, beneath the thick crust of imposed peaceful
+maxims and commercial pursuits and habitual stiff correctness.  As much
+as wine, will music bring out the native bent of the civilized man: endow
+him with language too.  He was as if unlocked; he met Nesta's eyes and
+ran in a voluble interchange, that gave him flattering after-thoughts;
+and at the moment sensibly a new and assured, or to some extent assured,
+station beside a girl so vivid; by which the young lady would be helped
+to perceive his unvoiced solider gifts.
+
+Nataly observed them, thinking of Victor's mastering subtlety.  She had
+hoped (having clearly seen the sheep's eye in the shepherd) that Mr.
+Barmby would be watchful to act as a block between them; and therefore
+she had stipulated for his presence on the journey.  She remembered
+Victor's rapid look of readiness to consent:--he reckoned how naturally
+Mr. Barmby would serve as a foil to any younger man.  Mr. Barmby had
+tried all along to perform his part: he had always been thwarted; notably
+once at Gisors, where by some cunning management he and mademoiselle
+found themselves in the cell of the prisoner's Nail-wrought work while
+Nesta had to take Sowerby's hand for help at a passage here and there
+along the narrow outer castle-walls.  And Mr. Barmby, upon occasions, had
+set that dimple in Nesta's cheek quivering, though Simeon Fenellan was
+not at hand, and there was no telling how it was done, beyond the
+evidence that Victor willed it so.
+
+From the day of the announcement of Lakelands, she had been brought more
+into contact with his genius of dexterity and foresight than ever
+previously: she had bent to the burden of it more; had seen herself and
+everybody else outstripped--herself, of course; she did not count in a
+struggle with him.  But since that red dawn of Lakelands, it was almost
+as if he had descended to earth from the skies.  She now saw his
+mortality in the miraculous things he did.  The reason of it was, that
+through the perceptible various arts and shifts on her level, an opposing
+spirit had plainer view of his aim, to judge it.  She thought it a mean
+one.
+
+The power it had to hurry her with the strength of a torrent to an end
+she dreaded, impressed her physically; so far subduing her mind, in
+consequence, as to keep the idea of absolute resistance obscure, though
+her bosom heaved with the breath; but what was her own of a mind hung
+hovering above him, criticizing; and involuntarily, discomfortingly.
+She could have prayed to be led blindly or blindly dashed on: she could
+trust him for success; and her critical mind seemed at times a treachery.
+Still she was compelled to judge.
+
+When he said to her at night, pressing both her hands: 'This is the news
+of the day, my love!  It's death at last.  We shall soon be thanking
+heaven for freedom'; her fingers writhed upon his and gripped them in a
+torture of remorse on his behalf.  A shattering throb of her heart gave
+her sight of herself as well.  For so it is with the woman who loves in
+subjection, she may be a critic of the man, she is his accomplice.'
+
+'You have a letter, Victor?'
+
+'Confirmation all round: Fenellan, Themison, and now Skepsey.'
+
+He told her the tale of Skepsey and Jarniman, colouring it, as any
+interested animated conduit necessarily will.  Neither of them smiled.
+
+The effort to think soberly exhausted and rolled her back on credulity.
+
+It might not be to-day or next week or month: but so much testimony
+pointed to a day within the horizon, surely!
+
+She bowed her head to heaven for forgiveness.  The murderous hope stood
+up, stood out in forms and pictures.  There was one of a woman at her
+ease at last in the reception of guests; contrasting with an ironic
+haunting figure of the woman of queenly air and stature under a finger of
+scorn for a bold-faced impostor.  Nataly's lips twitched at the
+remembrance of quaint whimpers of complaint to the Fates, for directing
+that a large instead of a rather diminutive woman should be the social
+offender fearing exposure.  Majesty in the criminal's dock, is a
+confounding spectacle.  To the bosom of the majestic creature, all her
+glorious attributes have become the executioner's implements.  She must
+for her soul's health believe that a day of release and exoneration
+approaches.
+
+'Barmby!--if my dear girl would like him best,' Victor said, in tenderest
+undertones, observing the shadowing variations of her face; and pierced
+her cruelly, past explanation or understanding;--not that she would have
+objected to the Rev. Septimus as officiating clergyman.
+
+She nodded.  Down rolled the first big tear.
+
+We cry to women; Land, ho!--a land of palms after storms at sea; and at
+once they inundate us with a deluge of eye-water.
+
+'Half a minute, dear Victor, not longer,' Nataly said, weeping, near on
+laughing over his look of wanton abandonment to despair at sight of her
+tears.  'Don't mind me.  I am rather like Fenellan's laundress, the
+tearful woman whose professional apparatus was her soft heart and a cake
+of soap.  Skepsey has made his peace with you?'
+
+Victor answered: 'Yes, yes; I see what he has been about.  We're a mixed
+lot, all of us-the best!  You've noticed, Skepsey has no laugh: however
+absurd the thing he tells you, not a smile!'
+
+'But you trust his eyes; you look fathoms into them.  Captain Dartrey
+thinks him one of the men most in earnest of any of his country.'
+
+'So Nataly of course thinks the same.  And he's a worthy little
+velocipede, as Fenellan calls him.  One wishes Colney had been with us.
+Only Colney!--pity one can't cut his talons for the space before they
+grow again.'
+
+Ay, and in the presence of Colney Durance, Victor would not have been so
+encouraging, half boyishly caressing, with Dudley Sowerby!  It was the
+very manner to sow seed of imitativeness in the girl, devoted as she was
+to her father.  Nataly sighed, foreseeing evil, owning it a superstition,
+feeling it a certainty.  We are easily prophets, sure of being justified,
+when the cleverness of schemes devoted to material ends appears most
+delicately perfect.  History, the tales of households, the tombstone, are
+with us to inspire.  In Nataly's bosom, the reproof of her inefficiency
+for offering counsel where Victor for his soul's sake needed it, was
+beginning to thunder at whiles as a reproach of unfittingness in his
+mate, worse than a public denunciation of the sin against Society.
+
+It might be decreed that she and Society were to come to reconcilement.
+A pain previously thought of, never previously so realized, seized her at
+her next sight of Nesta.  She had not taken in her front mind the
+contrast of the innocent one condemned to endure the shadow from which
+the guilty was by a transient ceremony released.  Nature could at a push
+be eloquent to defend the guilty.  Not a word of vindicating eloquence
+rose up to clear the innocent.  Nothing that she could do; no
+devotedness, not any sacrifice, and no treaty of peace, no possible joy
+to come, nothing could remove the shadow from her child.  She dreamed of
+the succour in eloquence, to charm the ears of chosen juries while a fact
+spoke over the population, with a relentless rolling out of its one hard
+word.  But eloquence, powerful on her behalf, was dumb when referred to
+Nesta.  It seemed a cruel mystery.  How was it permitted by the Merciful
+Disposer!  .  .  .  Nataly's intellect and her reverence clashed.  They
+clash to the end of time if we persist in regarding the Spirit of Life as
+a remote Externe, who plays the human figures, to bring about this or
+that issue, instead of being beside us, within us, our breath, if we
+will; marking on us where at each step we sink to the animal, mount to
+the divine, we and ours who follow, offspring of body or mind.  She was
+in her error, from judgeing of the destiny of man by the fate of
+individuals.  Chiefly her error was, to try to be thinking at all amid
+the fevered tangle of her sensations.
+
+A darkness fell upon the troubled woman, and was thicker overhead when
+her warm blood had drawn her to some acceptance of the philosophy of
+existence, in a savour of gratification at the prospect of her equal
+footing with the world while yet she lived.  She hated herself for taking
+pleasure in anything to be bestowed by a world so hap-hazard, ill-
+balanced, unjust; she took it bitterly, with such naturalness as not to
+be aware that it was irony and a poisonous irony moving her to welcome
+the restorative ceremony because her largeness of person had a greater
+than common need of the protection.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+CHIEFLY UPON THE THEME OF A YOUNG MAID'S IMAGININGS
+
+That Mausoleum at Dreux may touch to lift us.  History, pleads for the
+pride of the great discrowned Family giving her illumination there.  The
+pride is reverently postured, the princely mourning-cloak it wears
+becomingly braided at the hem with fair designs of our mortal humility in
+the presence of the vanquisher; against whom, acknowledgeing a visible
+conquest of the dust, it sustains a placid contention in coloured glass
+and marbles.
+
+Mademoiselle de Seilles, a fervid Orleanist, was thanked for having
+advised the curvature of the route homeward to visit 'the spot of so
+impressive a monument': as it, was phrased by the Rev. Septimus Barmby;
+whose exposition to Nesta of the beautiful stained-glass pictures of
+incidents in the life of the crusading St. Louis, was toned to be
+likewise impressive:--Colney Durance not being at hand to bewail the
+pathos of his exhaustless 'whacking of the platitudes'; which still
+retain their tender parts, but cry unheard when there is no cynic near.
+Mr. Barmby laid-on solemnly.
+
+Professional devoutness is deemed more righteous on such occasions than
+poetic fire.  It robes us in the cloak of the place, as at a funeral.
+Generally, Mr. Barmby found, and justly, that it is in superior
+estimation among his countrymen of all classes.  They are shown by
+example how to look, think, speak; what to do.  Poets are disturbing;
+they cannot be comfortably imitated, they are unsafe, not certainly the
+metal, unless you have Laureates, entitled to speak by their pay and
+decorations; and these are but one at a time-and a quotation may remind
+us of a parody, to convulse the sacred dome!  Established plain prose
+officials do better for our English.  The audience moved round with heads
+of undertakers.
+
+Victor called to recollection Fenellan's 'Rev. Glendoveer' while Mr.
+Barmby pursued his discourse, uninterrupted by tripping wags.  And those
+who have schemes, as well as those who are startled by the criticism in
+laughter to discover that they have cause for shunning it, rejoice when
+wits are absent.  Mr. Sowerby and Nesta interchanged a comment on Mr.
+Barmby's remarks: The Fate of Princes!  The Paths of Glory!  St. Louis
+was a very distant Roman Catholic monarch; and the young gentleman of
+Evangelical education could admire him as a Crusader.  St. Louis was for
+Nesta a figure in the rich hues of royal Saintship softened to homeliness
+by tears.  She doated on a royalty crowned with the Saint's halo, that
+swam down to us to lift us through holy human showers.  She listened to
+Mr. Barmby, hearing few sentences, lending his eloquence all she felt:
+he rolled forth notes of a minster organ, accordant with the devotional
+service she was holding mutely.  Mademoiselle upon St. Louis: 'Worthy to
+be named King of Kings!' swept her to a fount of thoughts, where the
+thoughts are not yet shaped, are yet in the breast of the mother
+emotions.  Louise de Seilles had prepared her to be strangely and deeply
+moved.  The girl had a heart of many strings, of high pitch, open to be
+musical to simplest wandering airs or to the gales.  This crypt of the
+recumbent sculptured figures and the coloured series of acts in the
+passage of the crowned Saint thrilled her as with sight of flame on an
+altar-piece of History.  But this King in the lines of the Crucifixion
+leading, gave her a lesson of life, not a message from death.  With such
+a King, there would be union of the old order and the new, cessation to
+political turmoil: Radicalism, Socialism, all the monster names of things
+with heads agape in these our days to gobble-up the venerable, obliterate
+the beautiful, leave a stoniness of floods where field and garden were,
+would be appeased, transfigured.  She hoped, she prayed for that glorious
+leader's advent.
+
+On one subject, conceived by her only of late, and not intelligibly, not
+communicably: a subject thickly veiled; one which struck at her through
+her sex and must, she thought, ever be unnamed (the ardent young creature
+saw it as a very thing torn by the winds to show hideous gleams of a body
+rageing with fire behind the veil): on this one subject, her hopes and
+prayers were dumb in her bosom.  It signified shame.  She knew not the
+how, for she had no power to contemplate it: there was a torment of earth
+and a writhing of lurid dust-clouds about it at a glimpse.  But if the
+new crusading Hero were to come attacking that--if some born prince nobly
+man would head the world to take away the withering scarlet from the face
+of women, she felt she could kiss the print of his feet upon the ground.
+Meanwhile she had enjoyment of her plunge into the inmost forest-well of
+mediaeval imaginativeness, where youthful minds of good aspiration
+through their obscurities find much akin to them.
+
+She had an eye for little Skepsey too: unaware that these French Princes
+had hurried him off to Agincourt, for another encounter with them and the
+old result--poor dear gentlemen, with whom we do so wish to be friendly!
+What amused her was, his evident fatigue in undergoing the slow parade,
+and sheer deference to his betters, as to the signification of a holiday
+on arrested legs.  Dudley Sowerby's attention to him, in elucidating the
+scenes with historical scraps, greatly pleased her.  The Rev. Septimus of
+course occupied her chiefly.
+
+Mademoiselle was always near, to receive his repeated expressions of
+gratitude for the route she had counselled.  Without personal objections
+to a well-meaning orderly man, whose pardonable error it was to be aiming
+too considerably higher than his head, she did but show him the voluble
+muteness of a Frenchwoman's closed lips; not a smile at all, and
+certainly no sign of hostility; when bowing to his reiterated compliment
+in the sentence of French.  Mr. Barmby had noticed (and a strong
+sentiment rendered him observant, unwontedly) a similar alert immobility
+of her lips, indicating foreign notions of this kind or that, in England:
+an all but imperceptible shortening or loss of corners at the mouth, upon
+mention of marriages of his clergy: particularly once, at his reading of
+a lengthy report in a newspaper of a Wedding Ceremony involving his
+favourite Bishop for bridegroom: a report to make one glow like Hymen
+rollicking the Torch after draining the bumper to the flying slipper.
+He remembered the look, and how it seemed to intensify on the slumbering
+features, at a statement, that his Bishop was a widower, entering into
+nuptials in his fifty-fourth year.  Why not?  But we ask it of Heaven and
+Man, why not?  Mademoiselle was pleasant: she was young or youngish; her
+own clergy were celibates, and--no, he could not argue the matter with a
+young or youngish person of her sex.  Could it be a reasonable woman--
+a woman!--who, disapproved the holy nuptials of the pastors of the
+flocks?  But we are forbidden to imagine the conducting of an argument
+thereon with a lady.
+
+Luther .  .  .  but we are not in Luther's time:--Nature .  .  .  no,
+nor can there possibly be allusions to Nature.  Mr. Barmby wondered at
+Protestant parents taking a Papistical governess for their young flower
+of English womanhood.  However, she venerated St. Louis; he cordially
+also; there they met; and he admitted, that she had, for a Frenchwoman,
+a handsome face, and besides an agreeably artificial ingenuousness in
+the looks which could be so politely dubious as to appear only dubiously
+adverse.
+
+The spell upon Nesta was not blown away on English ground; and when her
+father and mother were comparing their impressions, she could not but
+keep guard over the deeper among her own.  At the Chateau de Gisors,
+leftward off Vernon on Seine, it had been one of romance and wonderment,
+with inquisitive historic soundings of her knowledge and mademoiselle's,
+a reverence for the prisoner's patient holy work, and picturings of his
+watchful waiting daily, Nail in hand, for the heaven-sent sunlight on the
+circular dungeon-wall through the slits of the meurtrieres.  But the
+Mausoleum at Dreux spake religiously; it enfolded Mr. Barmby, his voice
+re-edified it.  The fact that he had discoursed there, though not a word
+of the discourse was remembered, allied him to the spirit of a day rather
+increasing in sacredness as it receded and left her less the possessor of
+it, more the worshipper.
+
+Mademoiselle had to say to herself: 'Impossible!' after seeing the drift
+of her dear Nesta's eyes in the wake of the colossal English clergyman.
+She fed her incredulousness indignantly on the evidence confounding it.
+Nataly was aware of unusual intonations, treble-stressed, in the Bethesda
+and the Galilee of Mr. Barmby on Concert evenings: as it were, the
+towering wood-work of the cathedral organ in quake under emission of its
+multitudinous outroar.  The 'Which?' of the Rev. Septimus, addressed to
+Nesta, when song was demanded of him; and her 'Either'; and his gentle
+hesitation, upon a gaze at her for the directing choice, could not be
+unnoticed by women.
+
+Did he know a certain thing?--and dream of urging the suit, as an
+indulgent skipper of parental pages?
+
+Such haunting interrogations were the conspirators' daggers out at any
+instant, or leaping in sheath, against Nataly's peace of mind.  But she
+trusted her girl's laughing side to rectify any little sentimental
+overbalancing.  She left the ground where maternal meditations are
+serious, at an image of Mr. Barmby knocking at Nesta's heart as a lover.
+Was it worth inquiry?
+
+A feminine look was trailed across the eyes of mademoiselle, with mention
+of Mr. Barmby's name.
+
+Mademoiselle rippled her shoulders.  'We are at present much enamoured of
+Bethesda.'
+
+That watchfullest showing no alarm, the absurdity of the suspicion
+smothered it.
+
+Nataly had moreover to receive startling new guests:
+
+Lady Rodwell Blachington: Mrs. Fanning, wife of the General: young Mrs.
+Blathenoy, wife of the great bill-broker: ladies of Wrensham and about.
+And it was a tasking of her energies equal to the buffeting of recurrent
+waves on deep sea.  The ladies were eager for her entry into Lakelands.
+She heard that Victor had appointed Lady Blachington's third son to the
+coveted post of clerk in the Indian house of Inchling and Radnor.  These
+are the deluge days when even aristocracy will cry blessings on the man
+who procures a commercial appointment for one of its younger sons
+offended and rebutted by the barrier of Examinations for the Civil
+Service.  'To have our Adolphus under Mr. Victor Radnor's protection, is
+a step!' Lady Blachington said.  Nataly was in an atmosphere of hints and
+revealings.  There were City Dinners, to which one or other of the
+residents about Lakelands had been taken before he sat at Victor's London
+table.  He was already winning his way, apparently without effort, to be
+the popular man of that neighbourhood.  A subterranean tide or a slipping
+of earth itself seemed bearing her on.  She had his promise indeed, that
+he would not ask of her to enter Lakelands until the day of his freedom
+had risen; but though she could trust to his word, the heart of the word
+went out of it when she heard herself thanked by Lady Blachington (who
+could so well excuse her at such a time of occupation for not returning
+her call, that she called in a friendly way a second time, warmly to
+thank her) for throwing open the Concert room at Lakelands in August, to
+an Entertainment in assistance of the funds for the purpose of erecting
+an East of London Clubhouse, where the children of the poor by day could
+play, and their parents pass a disengaged evening.  Doubtless a worthy
+Charity.  Nataly was alive to the duties of wealth.  Had it been simply a
+demand for a donation, she would not have shown that momentary pucker of
+the brows, which Lady Blachington read as a contrast with the generous
+vivacity of the husband.
+
+Nataly read a leaf of her fate in this announcement.  Nay, she beheld
+herself as the outer world wexedly beholds a creature swung along to the
+doing of things against the better mind.  An outer world is thoughtless
+of situations which prepare us to meet the objectionable with a will
+benumbed;--if we do not, as does that outer world, belong to the party of
+the readily heroical.  She scourged her weakness: and the intimation of
+the truth stood over her, more than ever manifest, that the deficiency
+affecting her character lay in her want of language.  A tongue to speak
+and contend, would have helped her to carve a clearer way.  But then
+again, the tongue to speak must be one which could reproach, and strike
+at errors; fence, and continually summon resources to engage the
+electrical vitality of a man like Victor.  It was an exultation of their
+life together, a mark of his holiness for them both, that they had never
+breathed a reproach upon one another.
+
+She dropped away from ideas of remonstrance; faintly seeing, in her sigh
+of submission, that the deficiency affecting her character would have
+been supplied by a greater force of character, pressing either to speech
+or acts.  The confession of a fated inevitable in the mind, is weakness
+prostrate.  She knew it: but she could point to the manner of man she was
+matched with; and it was not a poor excuse.
+
+Mr. Barmby, she thought, deserved her gratitude in some degree for
+stepping between Mr. Sowerby and Nesta.  The girl not having
+inclinations, and the young gentleman being devoid of stratagem, they
+were easily kept from the dangerous count of two.
+
+Mademoiselle would have said, that the shepherd also had rarely if ever a
+minute quite alone with her lamb.  Incredulously she perceived signs of a
+shock.  The secret following the signs was betrayed by Nesta in return
+for a tender grasp of hands and a droll flutter of eyelids.  Out it came,
+on a nod first; then a dreary mention of a date, and an incident, to
+bring it nearer to comprehension.  Mr. Barmby--and decide who will
+whether it is that Love was made to elude or that curates impelled by his
+fires are subtle as nether--had outwitted French watchfulness by stealing
+minutes enough on a day at Lakelands to declare himself.  And no wonder
+the girl looked so forlorn: he had shivered her mediaeval forest-palace
+of illuminated glass, to leave her standing like a mountain hind, that
+sniffs the tainted gale off the crag of her first quick leap from hounds;
+her instincts alarmed, instead of rich imagination colouring and
+fostering.
+
+She had no memory for his words; so, and truly, she told her Louise:
+meaning that she had only a spiceless memory; especially for the word
+love in her ears from the mouth of a man.
+
+There had been a dream of it; with the life-awakening marvel it would be,
+the humbleness it would bring to her soul beneath the golden clothing of
+her body: one of those faint formless dreams, which are as the bend of
+grasses to the breath of a still twilight.  She lived too spiritedly to
+hang on any dream; and had moreover a muffled dread-shadow-sister to the
+virginal desire--of this one, as of a fateful power that might drag her
+down, disorder, discolour.  But now she had heard it: the word, the very
+word itself! in her own ears! addressed to her! in a man's voice!  The
+first utterance had been heard, and it was over; the chapter of the book
+of bulky promise of the splendours and mysteries;--the shimmering woods
+and bushy glades, and the descent of the shape celestial, and the
+recognition--the mutual cry of affinity; and overhead the crimson
+outrolling of the flag of beneficent enterprises hand in hand, all was at
+an end.  These, then, are the deceptions our elders tell of!  That
+masculine voice should herald a new world to the maiden.  The voice she
+had heard did but rock to ruin the world she had been living in.
+
+Mademoiselle prudently forbore from satirical remarks on his person or on
+his conduct.  Nesta had nothing to defend: she walked in a bald waste.
+
+'Can I have been guilty of leading him to think .  .  .?' she said, in a
+tone that writhed, at a second discussion of this hapless affair.
+
+'They choose to think,' mademoiselle replied.  'It is he or another.  My
+dear and dearest, you have entered the field where shots fly thick, as
+they do to soldiers in battle; and it is neither your fault nor any
+one's, if you are hit.'
+
+Nesta gazed at her, with a shy supplicating cry of 'Louise.'
+
+Mademoiselle immediately answered the tone of entreaty.  'Has it happened
+to me?  I am of the age of eight and twenty; passable, to look at: yes,
+my dear, I have gone through it.  To spare you the questions tormenting
+you, I will tell you, that perhaps our experience of our feelings comes
+nigh on a kind of resemblance.  The first gentleman who did me the honour
+to inform me of his passion, was a hunchback.'
+
+Nesta cried 'Oh!' in a veritable pang of sympathy, and clapped hands to
+her ears, to shut out Mr. Barmby's boom of the terrific word attacking
+Louise from that deformed one.
+
+Her disillusionment became of the sort which hears derision.  A girl of
+quick blood and active though unregulated intellect, she caught at the
+comic of young women's hopes and experiences, in her fear of it.
+
+'My own precious poor dear Louise! what injustice there is in the world
+for one like my Louise to have a hunchback to be the first .  .  .  !'
+
+'But, my dear, it did me no harm.'
+
+'But if it had been known!'
+
+'But it was known!'
+
+Nesta controlled a shuddering: 'It is the knowledge of it in ourselves--
+that it has ever happened;--you dear Louise, who deserve so much better!
+And one asks--Oh, why are we not left in peace!  And do look at the
+objects it makes of us!'  Mademoiselle: could see, that the girl's
+desperation had got hold of her humour for a life-buoy.  'It is really
+worse to have it unknown--when you are compelled to be his partner in
+sharing the secret, and feel as if it were a dreadful doll you conceal
+for fear that everybody will laugh at its face.'
+
+She resumed her seriousness: 'I find it so hard to be vexed with him and
+really really like him.  For he is a good man; but he will not let one
+shake him off.  He distresses: because we can't quite meet as we did.
+Last Wednesday Concert evening, he kept away; and I am annoyed that I was
+glad.'
+
+'Moths have to pass through showers, and keep their pretty patterns from
+damage as best they can,' said mademoiselle.
+
+Nesta transformed herself into a disciple of Philosophy on the spot.
+'Yes, all these feelings of ours are moth-dust!  One feels them.  I
+suppose they pass.  They must.  But tell me, Louise, dear soul, was your
+poor dear good little afflicted suitor--was he kindly pitied?'
+
+'Conformably with the regulations prescribed to young damsels who are in
+request to surrender the custody of their hands.  It is easy to commit a
+dangerous excess in the dispensing of that article they call pity of
+them.'
+
+'And he--did he?--vowed to you he could not take No for an answer?'
+
+At this ingenuous question, woefully uttered, mademoiselle was pricked,
+to smile pointedly.  Nesta had a tooth on her under-lip.  Then, shaking
+vapours to the winds, she said: 'It is an honour, to be asked; and we
+cannot be expected to consent.  So I shall wear through it.--Only I do
+wish that Mr. Fenellan would not call him The Inchcape Bell!' She
+murmured this to herself.
+
+Mr. Barmby was absent for two weeks.  'Can anything have offended him?'
+Victor inquired, in some consternation, appreciating the man's worth, and
+the grand basso he was; together with the need for him at the Lakelands
+Concert in August.
+
+Nataly wrote Mr. Barmby a direct invitation.  She had no reply.  Her
+speculations were cut short by Victor, who handed her a brief note
+addressed to him and signed by the Rev. Septimus, petitioning for a
+private interview.
+
+The formality of the request incensed Victor.  'Now, dear love, you see
+Colney's meaning, when he says, there are people who have no intimacy in
+them.  Here's a man who visits me regularly once a week or more, has been
+familiar for years--four, at least; and he wants to speak to me, and must
+obtain the "privilege" by special appointment!  What can be the meaning
+of it?'
+
+'You will hear to-morrow afternoon,' Nataly said, seeing one paved way to
+the meaning--a too likely meaning. . . 'He hasn't been .  .  .  nothing
+about Fredi, surely!'
+
+'I have had no information.'
+
+'Impossible!  Barmby has good sense; Bottesini can't intend to come
+scraping on that string.  But we won't lose him; he's one of us.  Barmby
+counts for more at a Charity Concert than all the catalogue, and
+particularly in the country.  But he's an excellent fellow--eh?'
+
+'That he is,' Nataly agreed.
+
+Victor despatched a cheerful curt consent to see Mr. Barmby privately on
+the late afternoon of the day to follow.
+
+Nesta, returning home from the park at that hour of the interview,
+ignorant of Mr. Barmby's purpose though she was, had her fires
+extinguished by the rolling roar of curfew along the hall-passage,
+out of the library.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+SUITORS FOR THE HAND OF NESTA VICTORIA
+
+When, upon the well-known quest, the delightful singer Orpheus took that
+downward way, coming in sight of old Cerberus centiceps, he astutely
+feigned inattention to the hostile appearances of the multiple beast, and
+with a wave of his plectrum over the responsive lyre, he at the stroke
+raised voice.  This much you know.  It may be communicated to you, that
+there was then beheld the most singular spectacle ever exhibited on the
+dizzy line of division between the living and the dead.  For those
+unaccustomed musical tones in the last thin whiff of our sustaining air
+were so smartingly persuasive as to pierce to the vitals of the faithful
+Old Dog before his offended sentiments had leisure to rouse their heads
+against a beggar of a mortal.  The terrible sugariness which poured into
+him worked like venom to cause an encounter and a wrestling: his battery
+of jaws expressed it.  They gaped.  At the same time, his eyeballs gave
+up.  All the Dog, that would have barked the breathing intruder an
+hundredfold back to earth, was one compulsory centurion yawn.  Tears,
+issue of the frightful internal wedding of the dulcet and the sour
+(a ravishing rather of the latter by the former), rolled off his muzzles.
+
+Now, if you are not for insisting that a magnificent simile shall be
+composed of exactly the like notes in another octave, you will catch the
+fine flavour of analogy and be wafted in a beat of wings across the scene
+of the application of the Rev. Septimus Barmby to Mr. Victor Radnor, that
+he might enter the house in the guise of suitor for the hand of Nesta
+Victoria.  It is the excelling merit of similes and metaphors to spring
+us to vault over gaps and thickets and dreary places.  But, as with the
+visits of Immortals, we must be ready to receive them.  Beware, moreover,
+of examining them too scrupulously: they have a trick of wearing to
+vapour if closely scanned.  Let it be gratefully for their aid.
+
+So far the comparison is absolute, that Mr. Barmby passed: he was at
+liberty to pursue his quest.
+
+Victor could not explain how he had been brought to grant it.  He was at
+pains to conceal the bewilderment Mr. Barmby had cast on him, and make
+Nataly see the smallness of the grant:--both of them were unwilling to
+lose Barmby; there was not the slightest fear about Fredi, he said; and
+why should not poor Barmby have his chance with the others in the race!
+--and his Nataly knew that he hated to speak unkindly: he could cry the
+negative like a crack of thunder in the City.  But such matters as these!
+and a man pleading merely for the right to see the girl!--and pleading in
+a tone .  .  .  'I assure you, my love, he touched chords.'
+
+'Did he allude to advantages in the alliance with him?' Nataly asked
+smoothly.
+
+'His passion--nothing else.  Candid enough.  And he had a tone--he has a
+tone, you know.  It 's not what he said.  Some allusion to belief in a
+favourable opinion of him .  .  .  encouragement .  .  .  on the part of
+the mama.  She would have him travelling with us!  I foresaw it.'
+
+'You were astonished when it came.'
+
+'We always are.'
+
+Victor taunted her softly with having encouraged Mr. Barmby.
+
+She had thought in her heart--not seriously; on a sigh of despondency--
+that Mr. Barmby espousing the girl would smooth a troubled prospect: and
+a present resentment at her weakness rendered her shrewd to detect
+Victor's cunning to cover his own: a thing imaginable of him previously
+in sentimental matters, yet never accurately and so legibly printed on
+her mind.  It did not draw her to read him with a novel familiarity; it
+drew her to be more sensible of foregone intimations of the man he was
+--irresistible in attack, not impregnably defensive.  Nor did he seem in
+this instance humanely considerate: if mademoiselle's estimate of the
+mind of the girl was not wrong, then Mr. Barmby's position would be both
+a ridiculous and a cruel one.  She had some silly final idea that the
+poor man might now serve permanently to check the more dreaded applicant:
+a proof that her ordinary reflectiveness was blunted.
+
+Nataly acknowledged, after rallying Victor for coming to have his
+weakness condoned, a justice in his counter-accusation, of a loss of her
+natural cheerfulness, and promised amendment, with a steely smile, that
+his lips mimicked fondly; and her smile softened.  To strengthen the dear
+soul's hopes, he spoke, as one who had received the latest information,
+of Dr. Themison and surgeons; little conscious of the tragic depths he
+struck or of the burden he gave her heart to bear.  Her look alarmed him.
+She seemed to be hugging herself up to the tingling scalp, and was in a
+moment marble to sight and touch.  She looked like the old engravings of
+martyrs taking the bite of the jaws of flame at the stake.
+
+He held her embraced, feeling her body as if it were in the awful grip of
+fingers from the outside of life.
+
+The seizure was over before it could be called ominous.  When it was once
+over, and she had smiled again and rebuked him for excessive anxiety, his
+apprehensions no longer troubled him, but subsided sensationally in wrath
+at the crippled woman who would not obey the dictate of her ailments
+instantly to perish and spare this dear one annoyance.
+
+Subsequently, later than usual, he performed his usual mental penance for
+it.  In consequence, the wrath, and the wish, and the penitence, haunted
+him, each swelling to possession of him in turn; until they united to
+head a plunge into retrospects; which led to his reviewing the army of
+charges against Mrs. Burman.
+
+And of this he grew ashamed, attributing it to the morbid indulgence in
+reflection: a disease never afflicting him anterior to the stupid fall on
+London Bridge.  He rubbed instinctively for the punctilio-bump, and could
+cheat his fancy to think a remainder of it there, just below, half an
+inch to the right of, the spot where a phrenologist, invited by Nataly in
+old days, had marked philo-progenitiveness on his capacious and enviable
+cerebrum.  He knew well it was a fancy.  But it was a fact also, that
+since the day of the fall (never, save in merest glimpses, before that
+day), he had taken to look behind him, as though an eye had been knocked
+in the back of his head.
+
+Then, was that day of the announcement of Lakelands to Nataly, to be
+accounted a gloomy day?  He would not have it so.
+
+She was happily occupied with her purchases of furniture, Fredi with her
+singing lessons, and he with his business; a grasp of many ribands,
+reining-in or letting loose; always enjoyable in the act.  Recently only
+had he known when at home, a relaxation, a positive pleasure in looking
+forward to the hours of the City office.  This was odd, but so it was;
+and looking homeward from the City, he had a sense of disappointment when
+it was not Concert evening.  The Cormyns, the Yatts, and Priscilla
+Graves, and Pempton, foolish fellow, and that bothering Barmby, and
+Peridon and Catkin, were the lineing of his nest.  Well, and so they had
+been before Lakelands rose.  What had induced!  .  .  .  he suddenly felt
+foreign to himself.  The shrouded figure of his lost Idea on London
+Bridge went by.
+
+A peep into the folds of the shroud was granted him:--Is it a truth, that
+if we are great owners of money, we are so swollen with a force not
+native to us, as to be precipitated into acts the downright contrary of
+our tastes?
+
+He inquired it of his tastes, which have the bad habit of unmeasured
+phrasing when they are displeased, and so they yield no rational answer.
+Still he gave heed to violent extraneous harpings against money.
+Epigrams of Colney's; abuse of it and the owners of it by Socialist
+orators reported in some newspaper corner; had him by the ears.
+
+They ceased in the presence of Lady Grace Halley, who entered his office
+to tell him she was leaving town for Whinfold, her husband's family-seat,
+where the dear man lay in evil case.  She signified her resignation to
+the decrees from above, saying generously:
+
+'You look troubled, my friend.  Any bad City news?'
+
+'I look troubled?' Victor said laughing, and bethought him of what the
+trouble might be.  'City news would not cause the look.  Ah, yes;--I was
+talking in the street to a friend of mine on horseback the other day, and
+he kept noticing his horse's queer starts.  We spied half a dozen
+children in the gutter, at the tail of the horse, one of them plucking at
+a hair.  "Please, sir, may I have a hair out of your horse's tail?"  said
+the mite.  We patted the poor horse that grew a tail for urchins to pluck
+at.  Men come to the fathers about their girls.  It's my belief that
+mothers more easily say no.  If they learn the word as maids, you'll say!
+However, there's no fear about my girl.  Fredi's hard to snare.  And what
+brings you Cityward?'
+
+'I want to know whether I shall do right in selling out of the Tiddler
+mine.'
+
+'You have multiplied your investment by ten.'
+
+'If it had been thousands!'
+
+'Clearly, you sell; always jump out of a mounted mine, unless you're at
+the bottom of it.'
+
+'There are City-articles against the mine this morning--or I should have
+been on my way to Whinfold at this moment.  The shares are lower.'
+
+'The merry boys are at work to bring your balloon to the ground, that you
+may quit it for them to ascend.  Tiddler has enemies, like the best of
+mines: or they may be named lovers, if you like.  And mines that have
+gone up, go down for a while before they rise again; it's an affair of
+undulations; rocket mines are not so healthy.  The stories are false, for
+the time.  I had the latest from Dartrey Fenellan yesterday.  He's here
+next month; some time in August.'
+
+'He is married, is he not?'
+
+'Was.'
+
+Victor's brevity sounded oddly to Lady Grace.
+
+'Is he not a soldier?' she said.
+
+'Soldiers and parsons!' Victor interjected.
+
+Now she saw.  She understood the portent of Mr. Barmby's hovering offer
+of the choice of songs, and the recent tremulousness of the welling
+Bethesda.
+
+But she had come about her own business; and after remarking, that when
+there is a prize there must be competition, or England will have to lower
+her flag, she declared her resolve to stick to Tiddler, exclaiming: 'It's
+only in mines that twenty times the stake is not a dream of the past!'
+
+'The Riviera green field on the rock is always open to you,' said Victor.
+
+She put out her hand to be taken.  'Not if you back me here.  It really
+is not gambling when yours is the counsel I follow.  And if I'm to be a
+widow, I shall have to lean on a friend, gifted like you.  I love
+adventure, danger;--well, if we two are in it; just to see my captain in
+a storm.  And if the worst happens, we go down together.  It 's the
+detestation of our deadly humdrum of modern life; some inherited love of
+fighting.'
+
+'Say, brandy.'
+
+'Does not Mr. Durance accuse you of an addiction to the brandy novel?'
+
+'Colney may call it what he pleases.  If I read fiction, let it be
+fiction; airier than hard fact.  If I see a ballet, my troop of short
+skirts must not go stepping like pavement policemen.  I can't read dull
+analytical stuff or "stylists" when I want action--if I'm to give my mind
+to a story.  I can supply the reflections.  I'm English--if Colney 's
+right in saying we always come round to the story with the streak of
+supernaturalism.
+
+I don't ask for bloodshed: that's what his "brandy" means.'
+
+'But Mr. Durance is right, we require a shedding; I confess I expect it
+where there's love; it's part of the balance, and justifies one's
+excitement.  How otherwise do you get any real crisis?  I must read and
+live something unlike this flat life around us.'
+
+'There's the Adam life and the Macadam life, Fenellan says.  Pass it in
+books, but in life we can have quite enough excitement coming out of our
+thoughts.  No brandy there!  And no fine name for personal predilections
+or things done in domino!'  Victor said, with his very pleasant face,
+pressing her hand, to keep the act of long holding it in countenance and
+bring it to a well-punctuated conclusion: thinking involuntarily of the
+other fair woman, whose hand was his, and who betrayed a beaten visage
+despite--or with that poor kind of--trust in her captain.  But the
+thought was not guilty of drawing comparisons.  'This is one that I could
+trust, as captain or mate,' he pressed the hand again before dropping it.
+
+'You judge entirely by the surface, if you take me for a shifty person at
+the trial,' said Lady Grace.
+
+Skepsey entered the room with one of his packets, and she was reminded of
+trains and husbands.
+
+She left Victor uncomfortably rufed: and how? for she had none of the
+physical charms appealing peculiarly to the man who was taken with
+grandeur of shape.  She belonged rather to the description physically
+distasteful to him.
+
+It is a critical comment on a civilization carelessly distilled from the
+jealous East, when visits of fair women to City offices can have this
+effect.  If the sexes are separated for an hour, the place where one is
+excluded or not common to see, becomes inflammable to that appearing
+spark.  He does outrage to a bona Dea: she to the monasticism of the
+Court of Law: and he and she awaken unhallowed emotions.  Supposing,
+however, that western men were to de-orientalize their gleeful notions of
+her, and dis-Turk themselves by inviting the woman's voluble tongue to
+sisterly occupation there in the midst of the pleading Court, as in the
+domestic circle: very soon would her eyes be harmless: unless directed
+upon us with intent.
+
+That is the burning core of the great Question, our Armageddon in
+Morality: Is she moral?  Does she mean to be harmless?  Is she not
+untamable Old Nature?  And when once on an equal footing with her lordly
+half, would not the spangled beauty, in a turn, like the realistic
+transformation-trick of a pantomime, show herself to be that wanton old
+thing--the empress of disorderliness?  You have to recollect, as the
+Conservative acutely suggests, that her timidities, at present urging her
+to support Establishments, pertain to her state of dependence.  The party
+views of Conservatism are, must be, founded, we should remember, on an
+intimate acquaintance with her in the situations where she is almost
+unrestrictedly free and her laughter rings to confirm the sentences of
+classical authors and Eastern sages.  Conservatives know what they are
+about when they refuse to fling the last lattice of an ancient harem open
+to air and sun-the brutal dispersers of mystery, which would despoil an
+ankle of its flying wink.
+
+Victor's opinions were those of the entrenched majority; objecting to the
+occult power of women, as we have the women now, while legislating to
+maintain them so; and forbidding a step to a desperately wicked female
+world lest the step should be to wickeder.  His opinions were in the
+background, rarely stirred; but the lady had brought them forward; and he
+fretted at his restlessness, vexed that it should be due to the intrusion
+of the sex instead of to the charms of the individual.  No sting of the
+sort had bothered him, he called to mind, on board the Channel boat-
+nothing to speak of.  'Why does she come here!  Why didn't she go to her
+husband!  She gets into the City scramble blindfold, and catches at the
+nearest hand to help her out!  Nice woman enough.'  Yes, but he was
+annoyed with her for springing sensations that ran altogether heartless
+to the object, at the same time that they were disloyal to the dear woman
+their natural divinity.  And between him and that dear woman, since the
+communication made by Skepsey in the town of Dreux, nightly the dividing
+spirit of Mrs. Burman lay cold as a corpse.  They both felt her there.
+They kissed coldly, pressed a hand, said good night.
+
+Next afternoon the announcement by Skepsey of the Hon. Dudley Sowerby,
+surprised Victor's eyebrows at least, and caused him genially to review
+the visit of Lady Grace.
+
+Whether or not Colney Durance drew his description of a sunken nobility
+from the 'sick falcon' distinguishing the handsome features of Mr.
+Sowerby, that beaked invalid was particularly noticeable to Victor during
+the statement of his case, although the young gentleman was far from
+being one, in Colney's words, to enliven the condition of domestic fowl
+with an hereditary turn for 'preying'; eminently the reverse; he was of
+good moral repute, a worker, a commendable citizen.  But there was the
+obligation upon him to speak--it is expected in such cases, if only as a
+formality--of his 'love': hard to do even in view and near to the
+damsel's reddening cheeks: it perplexed him.  He dropped a veil on the
+bashful topic; his tone was the same as when he reverted to the material
+points; his present income, his position in the great Bank of Shotts and
+Co., his prospects, the health of the heir to the Cantor earldom.  He
+considered that he spoke to a member of the City merchants, whose
+preference for the plain positive, upon the question of an alliance
+between families by marriage, lends them for once a resemblance to lords.
+When a person is not read by character, the position or profession is
+called on to supply raised print for the finger-ends to spell.
+
+Hard on poor Fredi! was Victor's thought behind the smile he bent on this
+bald Cupid.  She deserved a more poetical lover!  His paternal sympathies
+for the girl besought in love, revived his past feelings as a wooer;
+nothing but a dread of the influence of Mr. Barmby's toned eloquence upon
+the girl, after her listening to Dudley Sowerby's addresses, checked his
+contempt for the latter.  He could not despise the suitor he sided with
+against another and seemingly now a more dangerous.  Unable quite to
+repress the sentiment, he proceeded immediately to put it to his uses.
+For we have no need to be scrupulously formal and precise in the
+exposition of circumstances to a fellow who may thank the stars if such a
+girl condescends to give him a hearing.  He had this idea through the
+conception of his girl's generosity.  And furthermore, the cognizant eye
+of a Lucretian Alma Mater having seat so strongly in Victor, demanded as
+a right an effusion of the promising amorous graces on the part of the
+acceptable applicant to the post of husband of that peerless.  These
+being absent, evidently non-existent, it seemed sufficient for the
+present, after the fashion of the young gentleman, to capitulate the few
+material matters briefly.
+
+They were dotted along with a fine disregard of the stateliness of the
+sum to be settled on Nesta Victoria, and with a distant but burning wish
+all the while, that the suitor had been one to touch his heart and open
+it, inspiriting it--as could have been done--to disclose for good and all
+the things utterable.  Victor loved clear honesty, as he loved light: and
+though he hated to be accused of not showing a clean face in the light,
+he would have been moved and lifted to confess to a spot by the touch at
+his heart.  Dudley Sowerby's deficiencies, however, were outweighed by
+the palpable advantages of his birth, his prospects, and his good repute
+for conduct; add thereto his gentlemanly manners.  Victor sighed again
+over his poor Fredi; and in telling Mr. Sowerby that the choice must be
+left to her, he had the regrets of a man aware of his persuasive arts and
+how they would be used, to think that he was actually making the choice.
+
+Observe how fatefully he who has a scheme is the engine of it; he is no
+longer the man of his tastes or of his principles; he is on a line of
+rails for a terminus; and he may cast languishing eyes across waysides to
+right and left, he has doomed himself to proceed, with a self-devouring
+hunger for the half desired; probably manhood gone at the embrace of it.
+This may be or not, but Nature has decreed to him the forfeit of
+pleasure.  She bids us count the passage of a sober day for the service
+of the morrow; that is her system; and she would have us adopt it, to
+keep in us the keen edge for cutting, which is the guarantee of
+enjoyment: doing otherwise, we lose ourselves in one or other of the
+furious matrix instincts; we are blunt to all else.
+
+Young Dudley fully agreed that the choice must be with Miss Radnor; he
+alluded to her virtues, her accomplishments.  He was waxing to
+fervidness.  He said he must expect competitors; adding, on a start, that
+he was to say, from his mother, she, in the case of an intention to
+present Miss Radnor at Court .  .  .  .
+
+Victor waved hand for a finish, looking as though, his head had come out
+of hot water.  He sacrificed Royalty to his necessities, under a kind of
+sneer at its functions: 'Court!  my girl?  But the arduous duties are
+over for the season.  We are a democratic people retaining the seductions
+of monarchy, as a friend says; and of course a girl may like to count
+among the flowers of the kingdom for a day, in the list of Court
+presentations; no harm.  Only there's plenty of time .  .  .  very young
+girls have their heads turned--though I don't say, don't imagine, my girl
+would.  By and by perhaps.'
+
+Dudley was ushered into Mr. Inchling's room and introduced to the figure-
+head of the Firm of Inchling, Pennergate, and Radnor: a respectable City
+merchant indeed, whom Dudley could read-off in a glimpse of the downright
+contrast to his partner.  He had heard casual remarks on the respectable
+City of London merchant from Colney Durance.  A short analytical gaze at
+him, helped to an estimate of the powers of the man who kept him up.  Mr.
+Inchling was a florid City-feaster, descendant of a line of City
+merchants, having features for a wife to identify; as drovers, they tell
+us, can single one from another of their round-bellied beasts.  Formerly
+the leader of the Firm, he was now, after dreary fits of restiveness,
+kickings, false prophecies of ruin, Victor's obedient cart-horse.  He
+sighed in set terms for the old days of the Firm, when, like trouts in
+the current, the Firm had only to gape for shoals of good things to
+fatten it: a tale of English prosperity in quiescence; narrated
+interjectorily among the by-ways of the City, and wanting only metre to
+make it our national Poem.
+
+Mr. Inchling did not deny that grand mangers of golden oats were still
+somehow constantly allotted to him.  His wife believed in Victor, and
+deemed the loss of the balancing Pennergate a gain.  Since that
+lamentable loss, Mr. Inchling, under the irony of circumstances the Tory
+of Commerce, had trotted and gallopped whither driven, racing like mad
+against his will and the rival nations now in the field to force the
+pace; a name for enterprise; the close commercial connection of a man who
+speculated--who, to put it plainly, lived on his wits; hurried onward and
+onward; always doubting, munching, grumbling at satisfaction, in
+perplexity of the gratitude which is apprehensive of black Nemesis at a
+turn of the road,--to confound so wild a whip as Victor Radnor.  He had
+never forgiven the youth's venture in India of an enormous purchase of
+Cotton many years back, and which he had repudiated, though not his share
+of the hundreds of thousands realized before the refusal to ratify the
+bargain had come to Victor.  Mr. Inchling dated his first indigestion
+from that disquieting period.  He assented to the praise of Victor's
+genius, admitting benefits; his heart refused to pardon, and consequently
+his head wholly to trust, the man who robbed him of his quondam
+comfortable feeling of security.  And if you will imagine the sprite of
+the aggregate English Taxpayer personifying Steam as the malignant who
+has despoiled him of the blessed Safety-Assurance he once had from his
+God Neptune against invaders, you will comprehend the state of Mr.
+Inchling's mind in regard to his terrific and bountiful, but very
+disturbing partner.
+
+He thanked heaven to his wife often, that he had nothing to do with North
+American or South American mines and pastures or with South Africa and,
+gold and diamonds: and a wife must sometimes listen, mastering her inward
+comparisons.  Dr. Schlesien had met and meditated on this example of the
+island energy.  Mr. Inchling was not permitted by his wife to be much the
+guest of the Radnor household, because of the frequent meeting there with
+Colney Durance; Colney's humour for satire being instantly in bristle at
+sight of his representative of English City merchants: 'over whom,' as he
+wrote of the venerable body, 'the disciplined and instructed Germans not
+deviously march; whom acute and adventurous Americans, with half a cock
+of the eye in passing, compassionately outstrip.'  He and Dr. Schlesien
+agreed upon Mr. Inchling.  Meantime the latter gentleman did his part at
+the tables of the wealthier City Companies, and retained his appearance
+of health; he was beginning to think, upon a calculation of the increased
+treasures of those Companies and the country, that we, the Taxpayer,
+ought not to leave it altogether to Providence to defend them;
+notwithstanding the watchful care of us hitherto shown by our briny
+Providence, to save us from anxiety and expense.  But there are, he said,
+'difficulties'; and the very word could stop him, as commonly when our
+difficulty lies in the exercise of thinking.
+
+Victor's African room, containing large wall-maps of auriferous regions,
+was inspected; and another, where clerks were busy over miscellaneous
+Continents.  Dudley Sowerby hoped he might win the maiden.
+
+He and Victor walked in company Westward.  The shop of Boyle and
+Luckwort, chemists, was not passed on this occasion.  Dudley grieved that
+he had to be absent from the next Concert for practise, owing to his
+engagement to his mother to go down to the family seat near Tunbridge
+Wells.  Victor mentioned his relatives, the Duvidney maiden ladies,
+residing near the Wells.  They measured the distance between Cronidge and
+Moorsedge, the two houses, as for half an hour on horseback.
+
+Nesta told her father at home that the pair of them had been observed
+confidentially arm in arm, and conversing so profoundly.
+
+'Who, do you think, was the topic?' Victor asked.
+
+She would not chase the little blue butterfly of a guess.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Ask not why, where reason never was
+Cover of action as an escape from perplexity
+Honest creatures who will not accept a lift from fiction
+Judgeing of the destiny of man by the fate of individuals
+Memory inspired by the sensations
+Nature could at a push be eloquent to defend the guilty
+Satirist too devotedly loves his lash to be a persuasive teacher
+Slave of existing conventions
+Startled by the criticism in laughter
+The impalpable which has prevailing weight
+There is little to be learnt when a little is known
+They kissed coldly, pressed a hand, said good night
+Who enjoyed simple things when commanding the luxuries
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of One Our Conquerors, v2
+by George Meredith
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS
+
+By GEORGE MEREDITH
+
+1897
+
+
+
+BOOK 3.
+
+XIX.      TREATS OF NATURE AND CIRCUMSTANCE AND THE DISSENSION BETWEEN
+          THEM AND OF A SATIRIST'S MALIGNITY IN THE DIRECTION OF HIS
+          COUNTRY
+XX.       THE GREAT ASSEMBLY AT LAKELAND
+XXI.      DARTREY FENELLAN
+XXII.     CONCERNS THE INTRUSION OF JARNIMAN
+XXIII.    TREATS OF THE LADIES' LAPDOG TASSO FOR AN INSTANCE OF MOMENTOUS
+          EFFECTS PRODUCED BY VERY MINOR CAUSES
+XXIV.     NESTA'S ENGAGEMENT
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+TREATS OF NATURE AND CIRCUMSTANCE AND THE DISSENSION BETWEEN THEM AND OF
+A SATIRIST'S MALIGNITY IN THE DIRECTION OF HIS COUNTRY
+
+There is at times in the hearts of all men of active life a vivid wild
+moment or two of dramatic dialogue between the veteran antagonists,
+Nature and Circumstance, when they, whose business it should be to be
+joyfully one, furiously split; and the Dame is up with her shrillest
+querulousness to inquire of her offspring, for the distinct original
+motive of his conduct.  Why did he bring her to such a pass!  And what is
+the gain?  If he be not an alienated issue of the great Mother, he will
+strongly incline to her view, that he put himself into harness to join
+with a machine going the dead contrary way of her welfare; and thereby
+wrote himself donkey, for his present reading.  Soldiers, heroes, even
+the braided, even the wearers of the gay cock's feathers, who get the
+honours and the pocket-pieces, know the moment of her electrical
+eloquence.  They have no answer for her, save an index at the machine
+pushing them on yet farther under the enemy's line of fire, where they
+pluck the golden wreath or the livid, and in either case listen no more.
+They glorify her topping wisdom while on the march to confound it.  She
+is wise in her way.  But, it is asked by the disputant, If we had
+followed her exclusively, how far should we have travelled from our
+starting-point?  We of the world and its prizes and duties must do her an
+injury to make her tongue musical to us, and her argument worthy of
+attention.  So it seems.  How to keep the proper balance between those
+two testy old wranglers, that rarely pull the right way together, is as
+much the task for men in the grip of the world, as for the wanton
+youthful fry under dominion of their instincts; and probably, when it is
+done, man will have attained the golden age of his retirement from
+service.
+
+Why be scheming?  Victor asked.  Unlike the gallant soldiery, his
+question was raised in the blush of a success, from an examination of the
+quality of the thing won; although it had not changed since it was first
+coveted; it was demonstrably the same: and an astonishing dry stick he
+held, as a reward for perpetual agitations and perversions of his natural
+tastes.  Here was a Dudley Sowerby, the direct issue of the conception of
+Lakelands; if indeed they were not conceived together in one; and the
+young gentleman had moral character, good citizen substance, and station,
+rank, prospect of a title; and the grasp of him was firm.  Yet so far was
+it from hearty, that when hearing a professed satirist like Colney
+Durance remark on the decorous manner of Dudley's transparent courtship
+of the girl, under his look of an awakened approval of himself, that he
+appeared to be asking everybody:--Do you not think I bid fair for an
+excellent father of Philistines?--Victor had a nip of spite at the
+thought of Dudley's dragging him bodily to be the grandfather.  Poor
+Fredi, too!--necessarily the mother: condemned by her hard fate to feel
+proud of Philistine babies!  Though women soon get reconciled to it!  Or
+do they?  They did once.  What if his Fredi turned out one of the modern
+young women, who have drunk of ideas?  He caught himself speculating on
+that, as on a danger.  The alliance with Dudley really seemed to set him
+facing backward.
+
+Colney might not have been under prompting of Nataly when he derided
+Dudley; but Victor was at war with the picture of her, in her compression
+of a cruel laugh, while her eyelids were hard shut, as if to exclude the
+young patriarch of Philistines' ridiculous image.
+
+He hearkened to the Nature interrogating him, why had he stepped on a
+path to put division between himself and his beloved?--the smallest of
+gaps; and still the very smallest between nuptial lovers is a division--
+and that may become a mortal wound to their one-life.  Why had he roused
+a slumbering world?  Glimpses of the world's nurse-like, old-fashioned,
+mother-nightcap benevolence to its kicking favourites; its long-suffering
+tolerance for the heroic breakers of its rough-cast laws, while the
+decent curtain continues dropped, or lifted only ankle-high; together
+with many scenes, lively suggestions, of the choice of ways he liked
+best, told of things, which were better things, incomprehensibly
+forfeited.  So that the plain sense of value insisted on more than one
+weighing of the gain in hand: a dubious measure.
+
+He was as little disposed to reject it as to stop his course at a goal of
+his aim.  Nevertheless, a gain thus poorly estimated, could not command
+him to do a deed of humiliation on account of it.  The speaking to this
+dry young Dudley was not imperative at present.  A word would do in the
+day to come.
+
+Nataly was busy with her purchases of furniture, and the practise for the
+great August Concert.  He dealt her liberal encouragements, up to the
+verge of Dr. Themison's latest hummed words touching Mrs. Burman, from
+which he jumped in alarm lest he should paralyze her again: the dear
+soul's dreaded aspect of an earthy pallor was a spectre behind her
+cheeks, ready to rush forth.  Fenellan brought Carling to dine with him;
+and Themison was confirmed by Carting, with incidents in proof; Caning by
+Jarniman, also with incidents; one very odd one--or so it seemed, in the
+fury of the first savour of it:--she informed Jarniman, Skepsey said his
+friend Jarniman said, that she had dreamed of making her appearance to
+him on the night of the 23rd August, and of setting the date on the
+calendar over his desk, when she entered his room: 'Sitting-room, not
+bedroom; she was always quite the lady,' Skepsey reported his Jarniman.
+Mrs. Burman, as a ghost, would respect herself; she would keep to her
+character.  Jarniman quite expected the dream to be verified; she was a
+woman of her word: he believed she had received a revelation of the
+approaching fact: he was preparing for the scene.
+
+Victor had to keep silent and discourse of general prosperity.  His happy
+vivaciousness assisted him to feel it by day.  Nataly heard him at night,
+on a moan: 'Poor soul!' and loudly once while performing an abrupt demi-
+vault from back to side: 'Perhaps now!' in a voice through doors.  She
+schooled herself to breathe equably.
+
+Not being allowed to impart the distressing dose of comfort he was
+charged with, he swallowed it himself; and these were the consequences.
+And an uneasy sleep was traditionally a matter for grave debate in the
+Radnor family.  The Duvidney ladies, Dorothea and Virginia, would have
+cited ancestral names, showing it to be the worst of intimations.  At
+night, lying on his back beneath a weight of darkness, one heavily craped
+figure, distinguishable through the gloom, as a blot on a black pad,
+accused the answering darkness within him, until his mind was dragged to
+go through the whole case by morning light; and the compassionate man
+appealed to common sense, to stamp and pass his delectable sophistries;
+as, that it was his intense humaneness, which exposed him to an
+accusation of inhumanity; his prayer for the truly best to happen, which
+anticipated Mrs. Burman's expiry.  They were simple sophistries,
+fabricated to suit his needs, readily taking and bearing the imprimatur
+of common sense.  They refreshed him, as a chemical scent a crowded room.
+
+All because he could not open his breast to Nataly, by reason of her
+feebleness; or feel enthusiasm in the possession of young Dudley!  A dry
+stick indeed beside him on the walk Westward.  Good quality wood, no
+doubt, but dry, varnished for conventional uses.  Poor dear Fredi would
+have to crown it like the May-day posy of the urchins of Craye Farm and
+Creckholt!
+
+Dudley wished the great City-merchant to appreciate him as a diligent
+student of commercial matters: rivalries of Banks; Foreign and Municipal
+Loans, American Rails, and Argentine; new Companies of wholesome
+appearance or sinister; or starting with a dram in the stomach, or born
+to bleat prostrate, like sheep on their backs in a ditch; Trusts and
+Founders; Breweries bursting vats upon the markets, and England prone
+along the gutters, gobbling, drunk for shares, and sober in the
+possession of certain of them.  But when, as Colney says, a grateful
+England has conferred the Lordship on her Brewer, he gratefully hands-
+over the establishment to his country; and both may disregard the howls
+of a Salvation Army of shareholders.--Beaten by the Germans in Brewery,
+too!  Dr. Schlesien has his right to crow.  We were ahead of them, and
+they came and studied us, and they studied Chemistry as well; while we
+went on down our happy-go-lucky old road; and then had to hire their
+young Professors, and then to import their beer.
+
+Have the Germans more brains than we English?  Victor's blood up to the
+dome of his cranium knocked the patriotic negative.  But, as old Colney
+says (and bother him, for constantly intruding!), the comfortably
+successful have the habit of sitting, and that dulls the brain yet more
+than it eases the person: hence are we outpaced; we have now to know we
+are racing.  Victor scored a mark for one of his projects.  A well-
+conducted Journal of the sharpest pens in the land might, at a sacrifice
+of money grandly sunk, expose to his English how and to what degree their
+sports, and their fierce feastings, and their opposition to ideas, and
+their timidity in regard to change, and their execration of criticism
+applied to themselves, and their unanimous adoption of it for a weapon
+against others, are signs of a prolonged indulgence in the cushioned
+seat.  Victor saw it.  But would the people he loved?  He agreed with
+Colney, forgetting the satirist's venom: to-wit; that the journalists
+should be close under their editor's rod to put it in sound bold
+English;--no metaphors, no similes, nor flowery insubstantiality: but
+honest Saxon manger stuff: and put it repeatedly, in contempt of the
+disgust of iteration; hammering so a soft place on the Anglican skull,
+which is rubbed in consequence, and taught at last through soreness to
+reflect.--A Journal?--with Colney Durance for Editor?--and called
+conformably THE WHIPPING-TOP?  Why not, if it exactly hits the
+signification of the Journal and that which it would have the country do
+to itself, to keep it going and truly topping?  For there is no vulgarity
+in a title strongly signifying the intent.  Victor wrote it at night,
+naming Colney for Editor, with a sum of his money to be devoted to the
+publication, in a form of memorandum; and threw it among the papers in
+his desk.
+
+Young Dudley had a funny inquisitiveness about Dartrey Fenellan; owing to
+Fredi's reproduction or imitation of her mother's romantic sentiment for
+Dartrey, doubtless: a bit of jealousy, indicating that the dry fellow had
+his feelings.  Victor touched--off an outline of Dartrey's history and
+character:--the half-brother of Simeon, considerably younger, and totally
+different.  'Dartrey's mother was Lady Charlotte Kiltorne, one of the
+Clanconans; better mother than wife, perhaps; and no reproach on her, not
+a shadow; only she made the General's Bank-notes fly black paper.  And--
+if you 're for heredity--the queer point is, that Simeon, whose mother
+was a sober-minded woman, has always been the spendthrift.  Dartrey
+married one of the Hennen women, all an odd lot, all handsome.  I met her
+once.  Colney said, she came up here with a special commission from the
+Prince of Darkness.  There are women who stir the unholy in men--whether
+they mean it or not, you know.'
+
+Dudley pursed to remark, that he could not say he did know.  And good for
+Fredi if he did not know, and had his objections to the knowledge!  But
+he was like the men who escape colds by wrapping in comforters instead of
+trusting to the spin of the blood.
+
+'She played poor Dartrey pranks before he buried--he, behaved well to
+her; and that says much for him; he has: a devil of a temper.  I 've seen
+the blood in his veins, mount to cracking.  But there's the man: because
+she was a woman, he never let it break out with her.  And, by heaven, he
+had cause.  She couldn't be left.  She tricked him, and she loved him-
+passionately, I believe.  You don't understand women loving the husband
+they drag through the mire?'
+
+Dudley did not.  He sharpened his mouth.
+
+'Buried, you said, sir?--a widower?'
+
+'I've no positive information; we shall hear when he: comes back,' Victor
+replied hurriedly.  'He got a drenching of all the damns in the British
+service from his.  Generalissimo one day at a Review, for a trooper's
+negligence-button or stock missing, or something; and off goes Dartrey to
+his hut, and breaks his sword, and sends in his resignation.  Good
+soldier lost.  And I can't complain; he has been a right-hand man to me
+over in Africa.  But a man ought to have some control of his temper,
+especially a soldier.'
+
+Dudley put emphasis into his acquiescence.
+
+'Worse than that temper of Dartrey's, he can't forgive an injury.  He
+bears a grudge against his country.  You've heard Colney Durance abuse
+old England.  It's three parts factitious-literary exercise.  It 's milk
+beside the contempt of Dartrey's shrug.  He thinks we're a dead people,
+if a people; "subsisting on our fat," as Colney says.'
+
+'I am not of opinion that we show it,' observed Dudley.
+
+'We don't,' Victor agreed.  He disrelished his companion's mincing tone
+of a monumental security, and yearned for Dartrey or Simeon or Colney to
+be at his elbow rather than this most commendable of orderly citizens,
+who little imagined the treacherous revolt from him in the bosom of the
+gentleman cordially signifying full agreement.  But Dudley was not gifted
+to read behind words and looks.
+
+They were in the Park of the dwindling press of carriages, and here was
+this young Dudley saying, quite commendably: 'It's a pity we seem to have
+no means of keeping our parks select.'
+
+Victor flung Simeon Fenellan at him in thought.  He remembered a fable of
+Fenellan's, about a Society of the Blest, and the salt it was to them to
+discover an intruder from below, and the consequent accelerated measure
+in their hymning.
+
+'Have you seen anything offensive to you?' he asked.
+
+'One sees notorious persons.'
+
+Dudley spoke aloof from them--'out of his cold attics,' Fenellan would
+have said.
+
+Victor approved: with the deadened feeling common to us when first in sad
+earnest we consent to take life as it is.
+
+He perceived, too, the comicality of his having to resign himself to the
+fatherly embrace of goodness.
+
+Lakelands had him fast, and this young Dudley was the kernel of
+Lakelands.  If he had only been intellectually a little flexible in his
+morality!  But no; he wore it cap a pie, like a mediaeval knight his
+armour.  One had to approve.  And there was no getting away from him.  He
+was good enough to stay in town for the practise of the opening overture
+of the amateurs, and the flute-duet, when his family were looking for him
+at Tunbridge Wells; and almost every day Victor was waylaid by him at a
+corner of the Strand.
+
+Occasionally, Victor appeared at the point of interception armed with
+Colney Durance, for whom he had called in the Temple, bent on self-
+defence, although Colney was often as bitter to his taste as to Dudley's.
+Latterly the bitter had become a tonic.  We rejoice in the presence of
+goodness, let us hope; and still an impersonation of conventional,
+goodness perpetually about us depresses.  Dudley drove him to Colney for
+relief.  Besides it pleased Nataly that he should be bringing Colney
+home; it looked to her as if he were subjecting Dudley to critical
+inspection before he decided a certain question much, and foolishly,
+dreaded by the dear soul.  That quieted her.  And another thing, she
+liked him to be with Colney, for a clog on him; as it were, a tuning-fork
+for the wild airs he started.  A little pessimism, also, she seemed to
+like; probably as an appeasement after hearing, and having to share, high
+flights.  And she was, in her queer woman's way, always reassured by his
+endurance of Colney's company:--she read it to mean, that he could bear
+Colney's perusal of him, and satiric stings.  Victor had seen these petty
+matters among the various which were made to serve his double and treble
+purposes; now, thanks to the operation of young Dudley within him, he
+felt them.  Preferring Fenellan's easy humour to Colney's acid, he was
+nevertheless braced by the latter's antidote to Dudley, while reserving
+his entire opposition in the abstract.
+
+For Victor Radnor and Colney Durance were the Optimist and Pessimist of
+their society.  They might have headed those tribes in the country.  At a
+period when the omnibus of the world appears to its quaint occupants to
+be going faster, men are shaken into the acceptation, if not performance,
+of one part or the other as it is dictated to them by their temperaments.
+Compose the parts, and you come nigh to the meaning of the Nineteenth
+Century: the mother of these gosling affirmatives and negatives divorced
+from harmony and awakened by the slight increase of incubating motion to
+vitality.  Victor and Colney had been champion duellists for the rosy and
+the saturnine since the former cheerfully slaved for a small stipend in
+the City of his affection, and the latter entered on an inheritance
+counted in niggard hundreds, that withdrew a briefless barrister disposed
+for scholarship from the forlornest of seats in the Courts.  They had
+foretold of one another each the unfulfilled; each claimed the actual as
+the child of his prediction.  Victor was to have been ruined long back;
+Colney the prey of independent bachelors.  Colney had escaped his harpy,
+and Victor could be called a millionaire and more.  Prophesy was crowned
+by Colney's dyspepsia, by Victor's ticklish domestic position.  Their
+pity for one another, their warm regard, was genuine; only, they were of
+different temperaments; and we have to distinguish, that in many
+estimable and some gifted human creatures, it is the quality of the blood
+which directs the current of opinion.
+
+Victor played-off Colney upon Dudley, for his internal satisfaction, and
+to lull Nataly and make her laugh; but he could not, as she hoped he was
+doing, take Colney into his confidence; inasmuch as the Optimist,
+impelled by his exuberant anticipatory trustfulness, is an author, and
+does things; whereas the Pessimist is your chaired critic, with the
+delivery of a censor, generally an undoer of things.  Our Optimy has his
+instinct to tell him of the cast of Pessimy's countenance at the
+confession of a dilemma-foreseen!  He hands himself to Pessimy, as it
+were a sugar-cane, for the sour brute to suck the sugar and whack with
+the wood.  But he cannot perform his part in return; he gets no
+compensation: Pessimy is invulnerable.  You waste your time in hurling a
+common 'tu-quoque' at one who hugs the worst.
+
+The three walking in the park, with their bright view, and black view,
+and neutral view of life, were a comical trio.  They had come upon the
+days of the unfanned electric furnace, proper to London's early August
+when it is not pipeing March.  Victor complacently bore heat as well as
+cold: but young Dudley was a drought, and Colney a drug to refresh it;
+and why was he stewing in London?  It was for this young Dudley, who
+resembled a London of the sparrowy roadways and wearisome pavements and
+blocks of fortress mansions, by chance a water-cart spirting a stale
+water: or a London of the farewell dinner-parties, where London's
+professed anecdotist lays the dust with his ten times told: Why was not
+Nataly relieved of her dreary round of the purchases of furniture!  They
+ought all now to be in Switzerland or Tyrol.  Nesta had of late been
+turning over leaves of an Illustrated book of Tyrol, dear to her after a
+run through the Innthal to the Dolomites one splendid August; and she and
+Nataly had read there of Hofer, Speckbacker, Haspinger; and wrath had
+filled them at the meanness of the Corsican, who posed after it as victim
+on St. Helena's rock; the scene in grey dawn on Mantua's fortress-walls
+blasting him in the Courts of History, when he strikes for his pathetic
+sublime.
+
+Victor remembered how he had been rhetorical, as the mouthpiece of his
+darlings.  But he had in memory prominently now the many glorious
+pictures of that mountain-land beckoning to him, waving him to fly forth
+from the London oven:--lo, the Tyrolese limestone crags with livid peaks
+and snow lining shelves and veins of the crevices; and folds of pinewood
+undulations closed by a shoulder of snow large on the blue; and a
+dazzling pinnacle rising over green pasture-Alps, the head of it shooting
+aloft as the blown billow, high off a broken ridge, and wide-armed in its
+pure white shroud beneath; tranced, but all motion in immobility, to the
+heart in the eye; a splendid image of striving, up to crowned victory.
+And see the long valley-sweeps of the hanging meadows and maize, and
+lower vineyards and central tall green spires!  Walking beside young
+Dudley, conversing, observing too, Victor followed the trips and twists
+of a rill, that was lured a little further down through scoops, ducts,
+and scaffolded channels to serve a wainwright.
+
+He heard the mountain-song of the joyful water: a wren-robin-thrush on
+the dance down of a faun; till it was caught and muted, and the silver
+foot slid along the channel, swift as moonbeams through a cloud, with an
+air of 'Whither you will, so it be on'; happy for service as in freedom.
+Then the yard of the inn below, and the rillwater twirling rounded
+through the trout-trough, subdued, still lively for its beloved onward:
+dues to business, dues to pleasure; a wedding of the two, and the wisest
+on earth:-eh?  like some one we know, and Nataly has made the comparison.
+Fresh forellen for lunch: rhyming to Fenellan, he had said to her; and
+that recollection struck the day to blaze; for his friend was a ruined
+military captain living on a literary quill at the time; and Nataly's
+tender pleading, 'Could you not help to give him another chance, dear
+Victor?'--signifying her absolute trust in his ability to do that or more
+or anything, had actually set him thinking of the Insurance Office; which
+he started to prosperity, and Fenellan in it, previously an untutored
+rill of the mountains, if ever was one.
+
+Useless to be dwelling on holiday pictures: Lakelands had hold of him!
+
+Colney or somebody says, that the greater our successes, the greater the
+slaves we become.--But we must have an aim, my friend, and success must
+be the aim of any aim!--Yes, and, says Colney, you are to rejoice in the
+disappointing miss, which saved you from being damned by your bullet on
+the centre.--You're dead against Nature, old Colney.--That is to carry
+the flag of Liberty.--By clipping a limb!
+
+Victor overcame the Pessimist in his own royal cranium-Court.  He
+entertained a pronounced dissension with bachelors pretending to
+independence.  It could not be argued publicly, and the more the pity:--
+for a slight encouragement, he would have done it: his outlook over the
+waves of bachelors and (by present conditions mostly constrained)
+spinsters--and another outlook, midnight upon Phlegethon to the thoughts
+of men, made him deem it urgent.  And it helped the plea in his own
+excuse, as Colney pointed out to the son of Nature.  That, he had to
+admit, was true.  He charged it upon Mrs. Burman, for twisting the most
+unselfish and noblest of his thoughts; and he promised himself it was to
+cease on the instant when the circumstance, which Nature was remiss in
+not bringing about to-day or to-morrow, had come to pass.  He could see
+his Nataly's pained endurance beneath her habitual submission.  Her
+effort was a poor one, to conceal her dread of the day of the gathering
+at Lakelands.
+
+On the Sunday previous to the day, Dr. Themison accompanied the amateurs
+by rail to Wrensham, to hear 'trial of the acoustics' of the Concert-
+hall.  They were a goodly company; and there was fun in the railway-
+carriage over Colney's description of Fashionable London's vast octopus
+Malady-monster, who was letting the doctor fly to the tether of its
+longest filament for an hour, plying suckers on him the while.  He had
+the look, to general perception, of a man but half-escaped: and as when
+the notes of things taken by the vision in front are being set down upon
+tablets in the head behind.  Victor observed his look at Nataly.  The
+look was like a door aswing, revealing in concealing.  She was not or did
+not appear struck by it; perhaps, if observant, she took it for a busy
+professional gentleman's holiday reckoning of the hours before the return
+train to his harness, and his arrangements for catching it.  She was, as
+she could be on a day of trial, her enchanting majestic self again--
+defying suspicions.  She was his true mate for breasting a world honoured
+in uplifting her.
+
+Her singing of a duet with Nesta, called forth Dr. Themison's very warm
+applause.  He named the greatest of contraltos.  Colney did better
+service than Fenellan at the luncheon-table: he diverted Nataly and
+captured Dr. Themison's ear with the narrative of his momentous
+expedition of European Emissaries, to plead the cause of their several
+languages at the Court of Japan: a Satiric Serial tale, that hit
+incidentally the follies of the countries of Europe, and intentionally,
+one had to think, those of Old England.  Nesta set him going.  Just when
+he was about to begin, she made her father laugh by crying out in a
+rapture, 'Oh!  Delphica!'  For she was naughtily aware of Dudley
+Sowerby's distaste for the story and disgust with the damsel Delphica.
+
+Nesta gave Dr. Themison the preliminary sketch of the grand object of the
+expedition: indeed one of the eminent ones of the world; matter for an
+Epic; though it is to be feared, that our part in it will not encourage a
+Cis-Atlantic bard.  To America the honours from beginning to end belong.
+
+So, then, Japan has decided to renounce its language, for the adoption of
+the language it may choose among the foremost famous European tongues.
+Japan becomes the word for miraculous transformations of a whole people
+at the stroke of a wand; and let our English enrol it as the most
+precious of the powerful verbs.  An envoy visits the principal Seats of
+Learning in Europe.  He is of a gravity to match that of his unexampled
+and all but stupefying mission.  A fluent linguist, yet an Englishman,
+the slight American accent contracted during a lengthened residence in
+the United States is no bar to the patriotism urging him to pay his visit
+of exposition and invitation from the Japanese Court to the distinguished
+Doctor of Divinity Dr. Bouthoin.  The renown of Dr. Bouthoin among the
+learned of Japan has caused the special invitation to him; a scholar
+endowed by an ample knowledge and persuasive eloquence to cite and
+instance as well as illustrate the superior advantages to Japan and
+civilization in the filial embrace of mother English.  'For to this it
+must come predestinated,' says the astonishing applicant.  'We seem to
+see a fitness in it,' says the cogitative Rev. Doctor.  'And an Island
+England in those waters, will do wonders for Commerce,' adds the former.
+'We think of things more pregnant,' concludes the latter, with a dry
+gleam of ecclesiastical knowingness.  And let the Editor of the Review
+upon his recent pamphlet, and let the prelate reprimanding him, and let
+the newspapers criticizing his pure Saxon, have a care!
+
+Funds, universally the most convincing of credentials, are placed at Dr.
+Bouthoin's disposal: only it is requested, that for the present the
+expedition be secret.  'Better so,' says pure Saxon's champion.  On a day
+patented for secresy, and swearing-in the whole American Continent
+through the cables to keep the secret by declaring the patent, the Rev.
+Dr. Bouthoin, accompanied by his curate, the Rev. Mancate Semhians,
+stumbling across portmanteaux crammed with lexicons and dictionaries and
+other tubes of the voice of Hermes, takes possession of berths in the
+ship Polypheme, bound, as they mutually conceive, for the biggest
+adventure ever embarked on by a far-thoughted, high-thoughted, patriotic
+pair speaking pure Saxon or other.
+
+Colney, with apologies to his hearers, avoided the custom of our period
+(called the Realistic) to create, when casual opportunity offers, a
+belief in the narrative by promoting nausea in the audience.  He passed
+under veil the Rev. Doctor's acknowledgement of Neptune's power, and the
+temporary collapse of Mr. Semhians.  Proceeding at once to the comments
+of these high-class missionaries on the really curious inquisitiveness of
+certain of the foreign passengers on board, he introduced to them the
+indisputably learned, the very argumentative, crashing, arrogant,
+pedantic, dogmatic, philological German gentleman, Dr. Gannius, reeking
+of the Teutonic Professor, as a library volume of its leather.  With him
+is his fairhaired artless daughter Delphica.  An interesting couple for
+the beguilement of a voyage: she so beautifully moderates his irascible
+incisiveness!  Yet there is a strange tone that they have.  What, then,
+of the polite, the anecdotic Gallic M. Falarique, who studiously engages
+the young lady in colloquy when Mr. Semhians is agitating outside them to
+say a word?  What of that outpouring, explosive, equally voluble,
+uncontrolled M. Bobinikine, a Mongol Russian, shaped, featured, hued like
+the pot-boiled, round and tight young dumpling of our primitive boyhood,
+which smokes on the dish from the pot?  And what of another, hitherto
+unnoticed, whose nose is of the hooked vulturine, whose name transpires
+as Pisistratus Mytharete?  He hears Dr. Bouthoin declaim some lines of
+Homer, and beseeches him for the designation of that language.  Greek,
+is it?  Greek of the Asiatic ancient days of the beginning of the poetic
+chants?  Dr. Gannius crashes cachinnation.  Dr. Bouthoin caps himself
+with the offended Don.  Mr. Semhians opens half an eye and a whole mouth.
+There must be a mystery, these two exclaim to one another in privacy.
+Delphica draws Mr. Semhians aside.
+
+Blushing over his white necktie, like the coast of Labrador at the
+transient wink of its Jack-in-the-box Apollo, Mr. Semhians faintly tells
+of a conversation he has had with the ingenuous fair one; and she ardent
+as he for the throning of our incomparable Saxon English in the mouths of
+the races of mankind.  Strange!--she partly suspects the Frenchman, the
+Russian, the attentive silent Greek, to be all of them bound for the
+Court of Japan.  Concurrents?  Can it be?  We are absolutely to enter on
+a contention with rivals?  Dr. Bouthoin speaks to Dr. Gannius.  He is
+astonished, he says; he could not have imagined it
+
+'Have you ever imagined anything?' Dr. Gannius asks him.  Entomologist,
+botanist, palaeontologist, philologist, and at sound of horn a ready
+regimental corporal, Dr. Gannius wears good manners as a pair of bath-
+slippers, to rally and kick his old infant of an Englishman; who, in awe
+of his later renown and manifest might, makes it a point of discretion to
+be ultra-amiable; for he certainly is not in training, he has no
+alliances, and he must diplomatize; and the German is a strong one; a
+relative too; he is the Saxon's cousin, to say the least.  This German
+has the habit of pushing past politeness to carry his argumentative war
+into the enemy's country: and he presents on all sides a solid rampart
+of recent great deeds done, and mailed readiness for the doing of more,
+if we think of assailing him in that way.  We are really like the poor
+beasts which have cast their shells or cases, helpless flesh to his beak.
+So we are cousinly.
+
+Whether more amused than amazed, we know not, Dr. Gannius hears from 'our
+simpleton of the pastures,' as he calls the Rev. Doctor to his daughter,
+that he and Mr. Semhians have absolutely pushed forth upon this most
+mighty of enterprises naked of any backing from their Government!  Babes
+in the Wood that they are!  'a la grace de dieu' at every turn that cries
+for astutia, they show no sign or symbol of English arms behind them, to
+support--and with the grandest of national prizes in view!--the pleading
+oration before the Court of the elect, erudites, we will call them, of an
+intelligent, yet half barbarous, people; hesitating, these, between
+eloquence and rival eloquence, cunning and rival cunning.  Why, in such a
+case, the shadow-nimbus of Force is needed to decide the sinking of the
+scale.  But have these English never read their Shakespeare, that they
+show so barren an acquaintance with human, to say nothing of semi-
+barbaric, nature?  But it is here that we Germans prove our claim to
+being the sons of his mind.--Dr. Gannius, in contempt, throws off the
+mask: he also is a concurrent.  And not only is he the chosen by election
+of the chief Universities of his land, he has behind him, as Athene
+dilating Achilles, the clenched fist of the Prince of thunder and
+lightning of his time.  German, Japan shall be!  he publicly swears
+before them all.  M. Falarique damascenes his sharpest smile;
+M. Bobinikine double-dimples his puddingest; M. Mytharete rolls a
+forefinger over his beak; Dr. Bouthoin enlarges his eye on a sunny mote.
+And such is the masterful effect of a frank diplomacy, that when one
+party shows his hand, the others find the reverse of concealment in
+hiding their own.
+
+Dr. Bouthoin and Mr. Semhians are compelled to suspect themselves to be
+encompassed with rivals, presumptively supported by their Governments.
+The worthy gentlemen had hoped to tumble into good fortune, as in the
+blessed old English manner.  'It has even been thus with us: unhelped we
+do it!' exclaims the Rev. Doctor.  He is roused from dejection by hearing
+Mr. Semhians shyly (he has published verse) tell of the fairtressed
+Delphica's phosphorial enthusiasm for our galaxy of British Poets.
+Assisted by Mr. Semhians, he begins to imagine, that he has, in the
+person of this artless devotee an ally, who will, through her worship of
+our poets (by treachery to her sire-a small matter) sacrifice her
+guttural tongue, by enabling him (through the exercise of her arts,
+charms, intrigues--also a small matter) to obtain the first audience of
+the Japanese erudites.  Delphica, with each of the rivals in turn, is
+very pretty Comedy.  She is aware that M. Falarique is her most
+redoubtable adversary, by the time that the vast fleet of steamboats
+(containing newspaper reporters) is beheld from the decks of the
+Polypheme puffing past Sandy Hook.
+
+There Colney left them, for the next instalment of the serial.
+
+Nesta glanced at Dudley Sowerby.  She liked him for his pained frown at
+the part his countrymen were made to play, but did wish that he would
+keep from expressing it in a countenance that suggested a worried knot;
+and mischievously she said: 'Do you take to Delphica?'
+
+He replied, with an evident sincerity, 'I cannot say I do.'
+
+Had Mr. Semhians been modelled on him?
+
+'One bets on the German, of course--with Colney Durance,' Victor said to
+Dr. Themison, leading him over the grounds of Lakelands.
+
+'In any case, the author teaches us to feel an interest in the rivals.
+I want to know what comes of it,' said the doctor.
+
+'There's a good opportunity, one sees.  But, mark me, it will all end in
+satire upon poor Old England.  According to Colney, we excel in nothing.'
+
+'I do not think there is a country that could offer the entertainment for
+which I am indebted to you to-day.'
+
+'Ah, my friend, and you like their voices?  The contralto?'
+
+'Exquisite.'
+
+Dr. Themison had not spoken the name of Radnor.
+
+'Shall we see you at our next Concert-evening in town?' said Victor; and
+hearing 'the privilege' mentioned, his sharp bright gaze cleared to
+limpid.  'You have seen how it stands with us here!'  At once he related
+what indeed Dr. Themison had begun speculatively to think might be the
+case.
+
+Mrs. Burman Radnor had dropped words touching a husband, and of her
+desire to communicate with him, in the event of her being given over to
+the surgeons: she had said, that her husband was a greatly gifted man;
+setting her head in a compassionate swing.  This revelation of the
+husband soon after, was filling.  And this Mr. Radnor's comrade's manner
+of it, was winning: a not too self-justifying tone; not void of feeling
+for the elder woman; with a manly eulogy of the younger, who had flung
+away the world for him and borne him their one dear child.  Victor took
+the blame wholly upon himself.  'It is right that you should know,' he
+said to the doctor's thoughtful posture; and he stressed the blame; and a
+flame shot across his eyeballs.  He brought home to his hearer the
+hurricane of a man he was in the passion: indicating the subjection of
+such a temperament as this Victor Radnor's to trials of the moral
+restraints beyond his human power.
+
+Dr. Themison said: 'Would you--we postpone that as long as we can: but
+supposing the poor lady .  .  . ?'
+
+Victor broke in: 'I see her wish: I will.'
+
+The clash of his answer rang beside Dr. Themison's faltering query.
+
+We are grateful when spared the conclusion of a sentence born to stammer.
+If for that only, the doctor pressed Victor's hand warmly.
+
+'I may, then, convey some form of assurance, that a request of the kind
+will be granted?' he said.
+
+'She has but to call me to her,' said Victor, stiffening his back.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+THE GREAT ASSEMBLY AT LAKELANDS
+
+Round the neighbourhood of Lakelands it was known that the day of the
+great gathering there had been authoritatively foretold as fine, by Mr.
+Victor Radnor; and he delivered his prophecy in the teeth of the South-
+western gale familiar to our yachting month; and he really inspired
+belief or a kind of trust; some supposing him to draw from reserves of
+observation, some choosing to confide in the singularly winged sparkle of
+his eyes.  Lady Rodwell Blachington did; and young Mrs. Blathenoy; and
+Mrs. Fanning; they were enamoured of it.  And when women stand for Hope,
+and any worshipped man for Promise, nothing less than redoubled confusion
+of him dissolves the union.  Even then they cling to it, under an
+ejaculation, that it might and should have been otherwise; fancy partly
+has it otherwise, in her caerulean home above the weeping.  So it is good
+at all points to prophecy with the aspect of the radiant day foretold.
+
+A storm, bearing battle overhead, tore the night to pieces.  Nataly's
+faith in the pleasant prognostic wavered beneath the crashes.  She had
+not much power of heart to desire anything save that which her bosom
+disavowed.  Uproar rather appeased her, calmness agitated.  She wished
+her beloved to be spared from a disappointment, thinking he deserved all
+successes, because of the rigours inflicted by her present tonelessness
+of blood and being.  Her unresponsive manner with him was not due to lack
+of fire in the blood or a loss of tenderness.  The tender feeling, under
+privations unwillingly imposed, though willingly shared, now suffused her
+reflections, owing to a gratitude induced by a novel experience of him;
+known, as it may chance, and as it does not always chance, to both sexes
+in wedded intimacy here and there; known to women whose mates are proved
+quick to compliance with delicate intuitions of their moods of nature.
+A constant, almost visible, image of the dark thing she desired, and was
+bound not to desire, and was remorseful for desiring, oppressed her; a
+perpetual consequent warfare of her spirit and the nature subject to the
+thousand sensational hypocrisies invoked for concealment of its reviled
+brutish baseness, held the woman suspended from her emotions.  She coldly
+felt that a caress would have melted her, would have been the temporary
+rapture.  Coldly she had the knowledge that the considerate withholding
+of it helped her spirit to escape a stain.  Less coldly, she thanked at
+heart her beloved, for being a gentleman in their yoke.  It plighted them
+over flesh.
+
+He talked to her on the pillow, just a few sentences; and, unlike
+himself, a word of City affairs: 'That fellow Blathenoy, with his
+increasing multitude of bills at the Bank: must watch him there, sit
+there regularly.  One rather likes his wife.  By the way, if you see him
+near me to-morrow, praise the Spanish climate; don't forget.  He heads
+the subscription list of Lady Blachington's Charity.'
+
+Victor chuckled at Colney's humping of shoulders and mouth, while the
+tempest seemed echoing a sulphurous pessimist.  'If old Colney had
+listened to me, when India gave proof of the metal and South Africa began
+heaving, he'd have been a fairly wealthy man by now .  .  .  ha!  it
+would have genialized him.  A man may be a curmudgeon with money: the
+rule is for him to cuddle himself and take a side, instead of dashing at
+his countrymen all round and getting hated.  Well, Colney popular, can't
+be imagined; but entertaining guests would have diluted his acid.  He has
+the six hundred or so a year he started old bachelor on; add his
+miserable pay for Essays.  Literature!  Of course, he sours.  But don't
+let me hear of bachelors moralists.  There he sits at his Temple Chambers
+hatching epigrams .  .  .  pretends to have the office of critic!  Honest
+old fellow, as far as his condition permits.  I tell him it will be fine
+to-morrow.'
+
+'You are generally right, dear,' Nataly said.
+
+Her dropping breath was audible.
+
+Victor smartly commended her to slumber, with heaven's blessing on her
+and a dose of soft nursery prattle.
+
+He squeezed her hand.  He kissed her lips by day.  She heard him sigh
+settling himself into the breast of night for milk of sleep, like one of
+the world's good children.  She could have turned to him, to show him she
+was in harmony with the holy night and loving world, but for the fear
+founded on a knowledge of the man he was; it held her frozen to the
+semblance of a tombstone lady beside her lord, in the aisle where horror
+kindles pitchy blackness with its legions at one movement.  Verily it was
+the ghost of Mrs. Burman come to the bed, between them.
+
+Meanwhile the sun of Victor Radnor's popularity was already up over the
+extended circle likely to be drenched by a falsification of his daring
+augury, though the scud flew swift, and the beeches raved, and the oaks
+roared and snarled, and pine-trees fell their lengths.  Fine tomorrow, to
+a certainty!  he had been heard to say.  The doubt weighed for something;
+the balance inclined with the gentleman who had become so popular: for he
+had done the trick so suddenly, like a stroke of the wizard; and was a
+real man, not one of your spangled zodiacs selling for sixpence and
+hopping to a lucky hit, laughed at nine times out of ten.  The reasoning
+went--and it somewhat affected the mansion as well as the cottage,--that
+if he had become popular in this astonishing fashion, after making one of
+the biggest fortunes of modern times, he might, he must, have secret
+gifts.  'You can't foretell weather!' cried a pothouse sceptic.  But the
+workmen at Lakelands declared that he had foretold it.  Sceptics among
+the common folk were quaintly silenced by other tales of him, being a
+whiff from the delirium attending any mention of his name.
+
+How had he become suddenly so popular as to rouse in the mind of Mr.
+Caddis, the sitting Member for the division of the county (said to have
+the seat in his pocket), a particular inquisitiveness to know the bearing
+of his politics?  Mr. Radnor was rich, true: but these are days when
+wealthy men, ambitious of notoriety, do not always prove faithful to
+their class; some of them are cunning to bid for the suffrages of the
+irresponsible, recklessly enfranchised, corruptible masses.  Mr. Caddis,
+if he had the seat in his pocket, had it from the support of a class
+trusting him to support its interests: he could count on the landowners,
+on the clergy, on the retired or retiring or comfortably cushioned
+merchants resident about Wrensham, on the many obsequious among electoral
+shopmen; annually he threw open his grounds, and he subscribed,
+patronized, did what was expected; and he was not popular; he was
+unpopular.  Why?  But why was the sun of this 23rd August, shining from
+its rise royally upon pacified, enrolled and liveried armies of cloud,
+more agreeable to earth's populations than his pinched appearance of the
+poor mopped red nose and melancholic rheumy eyelets on a January day!
+Undoubtedly Victor Radnor risked his repute of prophet.  Yet his
+popularity would have survived the continuance of the storm and deluge.
+He did this:--and the mystery puzzling the suspicious was nothing
+wonderful: in addition to a transparent benevolence, he spread a sort of
+assurance about him, that he thought the better of the people for their
+thinking well of themselves.  It came first from the workmen at his
+house.  'The right sort, and no humbug: likes you to be men.'  Such a
+report made tropical soil for any new seed.
+
+Now, it is a postulate, to strengthen all poor commoners, that not even
+in comparison with the highest need we be small unless we yield to think
+it of ourselves.  Do but stretch a hand to the touch of earth in you, and
+you spring upon combative manhood again, from the basis where all are
+equal.  Humanity's historians, however, tell us, that the exhilaration
+bringing us consciousness of a stature, is gas which too frequently has
+to be administered.  Certes the cocks among men do not require the
+process; they get it off the sight of the sun arising or a simple hen
+submissive: but we have our hibernating bears among men, our yoked oxen,
+cab horses, beaten dogs; we have on large patches of these Islands, a
+Saxon population, much wanting assistance, if they are not to feel
+themselves beaten, driven, caught by the neck, yoked and heavyheaded.
+Blest, then, is he who gives them a sense of the pride of standing on
+legs.  Beer, ordinarily their solitary helper beneath the iron canopy of
+wealth, is known to them as a bitter usurer; it knocks them flat in their
+persons and their fortunes, for the short spell of recreative exaltation.
+They send up their rough glory round the name of the gentleman--a
+stranger, but their friend: and never is friend to be thought of as a
+stranger--who manages to get the holiday for Wrensham and thereabout,
+that they may hurl away for one jolly day the old hat of a doddered
+humbleness, and trip to the strains of the internal music he has unwound.
+
+Says he: Is it a Charity Concert?  Charity begins at home, says he: and
+if I welcome you gentry on behalf of the poor of London, why, it follows
+you grant me the right to make a beginning with the poor of our parts
+down here.  He puts it so, no master nor mistress neither could refuse
+him.  Why, the workmen at his house were nigh pitching the contractors
+all sprawling on a strike, and Mr. Radnor takes train, harangues 'em and
+rubs 'em smooth; ten minutes by the clock, they say; and return train to
+his business in town; by reason of good sense and feeling, it was; poor
+men don't ask for more.  A working man, all the world over, asks but
+justice and a little relaxation--just a collar of fat to his lean.
+
+Mr. Caddis, M.P., pursuing the riddle of popularity, which irritated and
+repelled as constantly as it attracted him, would have come nearer to an
+instructive presentment of it, by listening to these plain fellows, than
+he was in the line of equipages, at a later hour of the day.  The remarks
+of the comfortably cushioned and wheeled, though they be eulogistic to
+extravagance, are vapourish when we court them for nourishment;
+substantially, they are bones to the cynical.  He heard enumerations of
+Mr. Radnor's riches, eclipsing his own past compute.  A merchant, a
+holder of mines, Director of a mighty Bank, projector of running rails,
+a princely millionaire, and determined to be popular--what was the aim of
+the man?  It is the curse of modern times, that we never can be sure of
+our Parliamentary seat; not when we have it in our pockets!  The Romans
+have left us golden words with regard to the fickleness of the populace;
+we have our Horace, our Juvenal, we have our Johnson; and in this vaunted
+age of reason it is, that we surrender ourselves into the hands of the
+populace!  Panem et circenses!  Mr. Caddis repeated it, after his
+fathers; his fathers and he had not headed them out of that original
+voracity.  There they were, for moneyed legislators to bewail their
+appetites.  And it was an article of his legislation, to keep them there.
+
+Pedestrian purchasers of tickets for the Charity Concert, rather openly,
+in an envelope of humour, confessed to the bait of the Radnor bread with
+bit of fun.  Savoury rumours were sweeping across Wrensham.  Mr. Radnor
+had borrowed footmen of the principal houses about.  Cartloads of
+provisions had been seen to come.  An immediate reward of a deed of
+benevolence, is a thing sensibly heavenly; and the five-shilling tickets
+were paid for as if for a packet on the counter.  Unacquainted with Mr.
+Radnor, although the reports of him struck a summons to their gastric
+juices, resembling in its effect a clamorous cordiality, they were
+chilled, on their steps along the halfrolled new gravel-roads to the
+house, by seeing three tables of prodigious length, where very evidently
+a feast had raged: one to plump the people--perhaps excessively courted
+by great gentlemen of late; shopkeepers, the villagers, children.  These
+had been at it for two merry hours.  They had risen.  They were beef and
+pudding on legs; in some quarters, beer amiably manifest, owing to the
+flourishes of a military band.  Boys, who had shaken room through their
+magical young corporations for fresh stowage, darted out of a chasing
+circle to the crumbled cornucopia regretfully forsaken fifteen minutes
+back, and buried another tart.  Plenty still reigned: it was the will of
+the Master that it should.
+
+We divert our attention, resigned in stoic humour, to the bill of the
+Concert music, handed us with our tickets at the park-gates: we have no
+right to expect refreshment; we came for the music, to be charitable.
+Signora Bianca Luciani: of whom we have read almost to the hearing her;
+enough to make the mistake at times.  The grand violinist Durandarte:
+forcibly detained on his way to America.  Mr. Radnor sent him a blank
+cheque:--no!--so Mr. Radnor besought him in person: he is irresistible;
+a great musician himself; it is becoming quite the modern style.  We have
+now English noblemen who play the horn, the fife--the drum, some say!  We
+may yet be Merrie England again, with our nobles taking the lead.
+
+England's nobles as a musical band at the head of a marching and dancing
+population, pictured happily an old Conservative country, that retained
+its members of aristocracy in the foremost places while subjecting them
+to downright uses.  Their ancestors, beholding them there, would be
+satisfied on the point of honour; perhaps enlivened by hearing them at
+fife and drum.
+
+But middle-class pedestrians, having paid five shillings for a ticket to
+hear the music they love, and not having full assurance of refreshment,
+are often, latterly, satirical upon their superiors; and, over this
+country at least, require the refreshment, that the democratic sprouts in
+them may be reconciled with aristocracy.  Do not listen to them further
+on the subject.  They vote safely enough when the day comes, if there is
+no praetematurally strong pull the other way.
+
+They perceive the name of the Hon. Dudley Sowerby, fourth down the
+Concert-bill; marked for a flute-duet with Mr. Victor Radnor, Miss Nesta
+Victoria Radnor accompanying at the piano.  It may mean?  .  .  .  do you
+want a whisper to suggest to you what it may mean?  The father's wealth
+is enormous; the mother is a beautiful majestic woman in her prime.  And
+see, she sings: a wonderful voice.  And lower down, a duet with her
+daughter: violins and clarionet; how funny; something Hungarian.  And in
+the Second Part, Schubert's Ave Maria--Oh! when we hear that, we
+dissolve.  She was a singer before he married her, they say: a lady by
+birth one of the first County families.  But it was a gift, and she could
+not be kept from it, and was going, when they met--and it was love! the
+most perfect duet.  For him she abandoned the Stage.  You must remember,
+that in their young days the Stage was many stages beneath the esteem
+entertained for it now.  Domestic Concerts are got up to gratify her: a
+Miss Fredericks: good old English name.  Mr. Radnor calls his daughter,
+Freddy; so Mr. Taplow, the architect, says.  They are for modern music
+and ancient.  Tannhauser, Wagner, you see.  Pergolese.
+
+Flute-duet, Mercadante.  Here we have him!  O--Durandarte: Air Basque,
+variations--his own.  Again, Senor Durandarte, Mendelssohn.  Encore him,
+and he plays you a national piece.  A dark little creature a Life-
+guardsman could hold-up on his outstretched hand for the fifteen minutes
+of the performance; but he fills the hall and thrills the heart, wafts
+you to heaven; and does it as though he were conversing with his
+Andalusian lady-love in easy whispers about their mutual passion for
+Spanish chocolate all the while: so the musical critic of the Tirra-Lirra
+says.  Express trains every half hour from London; all the big people of
+the city.  Mr. Radnor commands them, like Royalty.  Totally different
+from that old figure of the wealthy City merchant; young, vigorous,
+elegant, a man of taste, highest culture, speaks the languages of Europe,
+patron of the Arts, a perfect gentleman.  His mother was one of the
+Montgomerys, Mr. Taplow says.
+
+And it was General Radnor, a most distinguished officer, dying knighted.
+But Mr. Victor Radnor would not take less than a Barony--and then only
+with descent of title to his daughter, in her own right.
+
+Mr. Taplow had said as much as Victor Radnor chose that he should say.
+
+Carriages were in flow for an hour: pedestrians formed a wavy coil.
+Judgeing by numbers, the entertainment was a success; would the hall
+contain them?  Marvels were told of the hall.  Every ticket entered and
+was enfolded; almost all had a seat.  Chivalry stood.  It is a breeched
+abstraction, sacrificeing voluntarily and genially to the Fair, for a
+restoring of the balance between the sexes, that the division of good
+things be rather in the fair ones' favour, as they are to think: with the
+warning to them, that the establishment of their claim for equality puts
+an end to the priceless privileges of petticoats.  Women must be mad, to
+provoke such a warning; and the majority of them submissively show their
+good sense.  They send up an incense of perfumery, all the bouquets of
+the chemist commingled; most nourishing to the idea of woman in the nose
+of man.  They are a forest foliage--rustle of silks and muslins, magic
+interweaving, or the mythology, if you prefer it.  See, hear, smell, they
+are Juno, Venus, Hebe, to you.  We must have poetry with them; otherwise
+they are better in the kitchen.  Is there--but there is not; there is not
+present one of the chivalrous breeched who could prefer the shocking
+emancipated gristly female, which imposes propriety on our sensations and
+inner dreams, by petrifying in the tender bud of them.
+
+Colonel Corfe is the man to hear on such a theme.  He is a colonel of
+Companies.  But those are his diversion, as the British Army has been to
+the warrior.  Puellis idoneus, he is professedly a lady's man, a rose-
+beetle, and a fine specimen of a common kind: and he has been that thing,
+that shining delight of the lap of ladies, for a spell of years,
+necessitating a certain sparkle of the saccharine crystals preserving
+him, to conceal the muster.  He has to be fascinating, or he would look
+outworn, forlorn.  On one side of him is Lady Carmine; on the other, Lady
+Swanage; dames embedded in the blooming maturity of England's
+conservatory.  Their lords (an Earl, a Baron) are of the lords who go
+down to the City to sow a title for a repair of their poor incomes, and
+are to be commended for frankly accepting the new dispensation while they
+retain the many advantages of the uncancelled ancient.  Thus gently does
+a maternal Old England let them down.  Projectors of Companies,
+Directors, Founders; Railway magnates, actual kings and nobles (though
+one cannot yet persuade old reverence to do homage with the ancestral
+spontaneity to the uncrowned, uncoroneted, people of our sphere); holders
+of Shares in gold mines, Shares in Afric's blue mud of the glittering
+teeth we draw for English beauty to wear in the ear, on the neck, at the
+wrist; Bankers and wives of Bankers.  Victor passed among them, chatting
+right and left.
+
+Lady Carmine asked him: 'Is Durandarte counted on?'
+
+He answered: 'I made sure of the Luciani.'
+
+She serenely understood.  Artistes are licenced people, with a Bohemian
+instead of the titular glitter for the bewildering of moralists; as paste
+will pass for diamonds where the mirror is held up to Nature by bold
+supernumeraries.
+
+He wished to introduce Nesta.  His girl was on the raised orchestral
+flooring.  Nataly held her fast to a music-scroll.
+
+Mr. Peridon, sad for the absence and cause of absence of Louise de
+Seilles,--summoned in the morning abruptly to Bourges, where her brother
+lay with his life endangered by an accident at Artillery practise,--
+Mr. Peridon was generally conductor.  Victor was to lead the full force
+of amateurs in the brisk overture to Zampa.  He perceived a movement of
+Nataly, Nesta, and Peridon.  'They have come,' he said; he jumped on the
+orchestra boards and hastened to greet the Luciani with Durandarte in the
+retiring-room.
+
+His departure raised the whisper that he would wield the baton.  An
+opinion was unuttered.  His name for the flute-duet with the Hon. Dudley
+Sowerby had not provoked the reserve opinion; it seemed, on the whole, a
+pretty thing in him to condescend to do: the sentiment he awakened was
+not flustered by it.  But the act of leading, appeared as an official
+thing to do.  Our soufe of sentiment will be seen subsiding under a
+breath, without a repressive word to send it down.  Sir Rodwell
+Blachington would have preferred Radnor's not leading or playing either.
+Colonel Corfe and Mr. Caddis declined to consider such conduct English,
+in a man of station .  .  .  notwithstanding Royal Highnesses, who are at
+least partly English: partly, we say, under our breath, remembering our
+old ideal of an English gentleman, in opposition to German tastes.  It is
+true, that the whole country is changeing, decomposing!
+
+The colonel fished for Lady Carmine's view.  And Lady Swanage too?  Both
+of the distinguished ladies approved of Mr. Radnor's leading--for a
+leading off.  Women are pleased to see their favourite in the place of
+prominence--as long as Fortune swims him unbuffeted, or one should say,
+unbattered, up the mounting wave.  Besides these ladies had none of the
+colonel's remainder of juvenile English sense of the manly, his
+adolescent's intolerance of the eccentric, suspicion and contempt of any
+supposed affectation, which was not ostentatiously, stalkingly practised
+to subdue the sex.  And you cannot wield a baton without looking
+affected.  And at one of the Colonel's Clubs in town, only five years
+back, an English musical composer, who had not then made his money--now
+by the mystery of events knighted!--had been (he makes now fifteen
+thousand a year) black-balled.  'Fiddler?  no; can't admit a Fiddler to
+associate on equal terms with gentlemen.'  Only five years back: and at
+present we are having the Fiddler everywhere.
+
+A sprinkling of the minor ladies also would have been glad if Mr. Radnor
+had kept himself somewhat more exclusive.  Dr. Schlesien heard remarks,
+upon which his weighty Teutonic mind sat crushingly.  Do these English
+care one bit for music?--for anything finer than material stuffs?--what
+that man Durance calls, 'their beef, their beer, and their pew in
+eternity'?  His wrath at their babble and petty brabble doubted that they
+did.
+
+But they do.  Art has a hold of them.  They pay for it; and the thing
+purchased grapples.  It will get to their bosoms to breathe from them in
+time: entirely overcoming the taste for feudalism, which still a little
+objects to see their born gentleman acting as leader of musicians.  A
+people of slow movement, developing tardily, their country is wanting in
+the distincter features, from being always in the transitional state,
+like certain sea-fish rolling head over-you know not head from tail.
+Without the Welsh, Irish, Scot; in their composition, there would not be
+much of the yeasty ferment: but it should not be forgotten that Welsh,
+Irish, Scot, are now largely of their numbers; and the taste for
+elegance, and for spiritual utterance, for Song, nay, for Ideas, is there
+among them, though it does not everywhere cover a rocky surface to
+bewitch the eyes of aliens;--like Louise de Seilles and Dr. Schlesien,
+for example; aliens having no hostile disposition toward the people they
+were compelled to criticize; honourably granting, that this people has a
+great history.  Even such has the Lion, with Homer for the transcriber of
+his deeds.  But the gentle aliens would image our emergence from wildness
+as the unsocial spectacle presented by the drear menagerie Lion, alone or
+mated; with hardly an animated moment save when the raw red joint is
+beneath his paw, reminding him of the desert's pasture.
+
+Nevertheless, where Strength is, there is hope:--it may be said more
+truly than of the breath of Life; which is perhaps but the bucket of
+breath, muddy with the sediment of the well: whereas we have in Strength
+a hero, if a malefactor; whose muscles shall haul him up to the light he
+will prove worthy of, when that divinity has shown him his uncleanness.
+And when Strength is not exercising, you are sure to see Satirists jump
+on his back.  Dozens, foreign and domestic, are on the back of Old
+England; a tribute to our quality if at the same time an irritating
+scourge.  The domestic are in excess; and let us own that their view of
+the potentate, as an apathetic beast of power, who will neither show the
+power nor woo the graces; pretending all the while to be eminently above
+the beast, and posturing in an inefficient mimicry of the civilized,
+excites to satire.  Colney Durance had his excuses.  He could point to
+the chief creative minds of the country for generations, as beginning
+their survey genially, ending venomously, because of an exasperating
+unreason and scum in the bubble of the scenes, called social, around
+them.  Viola under his chin, he gazed along the crowded hall, which was
+to him a rich national pudding of the sycophants, the hypocrites, the
+burlies, the idiots; dregs of the depths and froth of the surface; bowing
+to one, that they may scorn another; instituting a Charity, for their
+poorer fawning fellows to relieve their purses and assist them in
+tricking the world and their Maker: and so forth, a tiresome tirade: and
+as it was not on his lips, but in the stomach of the painful creature,
+let him grind that hurdy-gurdy for himself.  His friend Victor set it
+stirring: Victor had here what he aimed at!
+
+How Success derides Ambition!  And for this he imperilled the happiness
+of the worthy woman he loved!  Exposed her to our fen-fogs and foul
+snakes--of whom one or more might be in the assembly now: all because of
+his insane itch to be the bobbing cork on the wave of the minute!
+Colney's rapid interjections condensed upon the habitual shrug at human
+folly, just when Victor, fronting the glassy stare of Colonel Corfe,
+tapped to start his orchestra through the lively first bars of the
+overture to Zampa.
+
+We soon perceive that the post Mr. Radnor fills he thoroughly fills,
+whatever it may be.  Zampa takes horse from the opening.  We have no
+amateur conductor riding ahead: violins, 'cellos, piano, wind-stops:
+Peridon, Catkin, Pempton, Yatt, Cormyn, Colney, Mrs. Cormyn, Dudley
+Sowerby: they are spirited on, patted, subdued, muted, raised, rushed
+anew, away, held in hand, in both hands.  Not earnestness worn as a
+cloak, but issuing, we see; not simply a leader of musicians, a leader of
+men.  The halo of the millionaire behind, assures us of a development in
+the character of England's merchant princes.  The homage we pay him
+flatters us.  A delightful overture, masterfully executed; ended too
+soon; except that the programme forbids the ordinary interpretation of
+prolonged applause.  Mr. Radnor is one of those who do everything
+consummately.  And we have a monition within, that a course of spiritual
+enjoyment will rouse the call for bodily refreshment.  His genial nod and
+laugh and word of commendation to his troop persuade us oddly, we know
+not how, of provision to come.  At the door of the retiring-room, see,
+he is congratulated by Luciani and Durandarte.  Miss Priscilla Graves is
+now to sing a Schumann.  Down later, it is a duet with the Rev. Septimus
+Barmby.  We have nothing to be ashamed of in her, before an Italian
+Operatic singer!  Ices after the first part is over.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+DARTREY FENELLAN
+
+Had Nataly and Nesta known who was outside helping Skepsey to play ball
+with the boys, they would not have worked through their share of the
+performance with so graceful a composure.  Even Simeon Fenellan was
+unaware that his half-brother Dartrey had landed in England.  Dartrey
+went first to Victor's office, where he found Skepsey packing the day's
+letters and circulars into the bag for the delivery of them at Lakelands.
+They sprang a chatter, and they missed the last of the express trains
+which did, not greatly signify, Skepsey said, 'as it was a Concert.'  To
+hear his hero talk, was the music for him; and he richly enjoyed the
+pacing along the railway-platform.
+
+Arrived on the grounds, they took opposite sides in a game of rounders,
+at that moment tossing heads or tails for innings.  These boys were
+slovenly players, and were made unhappy by Skepsey's fussy instructions
+to them in smartness.  They had a stupid way of feeding the stick, and
+they ran sprawling; it concerned Great Britain for them to learn how to
+use their legs.  It was pitiful for the country to see how lumpish her
+younger children were.  Dartrey knew his little man and laughed, after
+warning him that his English would want many lessons before they
+stomached the mixture of discipline and pleasure.  So it appeared: the
+pride of the boys in themselves, their confidence, enjoyment of the game,
+were all gone; and all were speedily out but Skepsey; who ran for the
+rounder, with his coat off, sharp as a porpoise, and would have got it,
+he had it in his grasp, when, at the jump, just over the line of the
+goal, a clever fling, if ever was, caught him a crack on that part of the
+human frame where sound is best achieved.  Then were these young lumps
+transformed to limber, lither, merry fellows.  They rejoiced Skepsey's
+heart; they did everything better, ran and dodged and threw in a style to
+win the nod from the future official inspector of Games and Amusements of
+the common people; a deputy of the Government, proposed by Skepsey to his
+hero with a deferential eagerness.  Dartrey clapped him on the shoulder,
+softly laughing.
+
+'System--Mr. Durance is right--they must have system, if they are to
+appreciate a holiday,' Skepsey said; and he sent a wretched gaze around,
+at the justification of some of the lurid views of Mr. Durance, in signs
+of the holiday wasted;--impoverishing the country's manhood in a small
+degree, it may be argued, but we ask, can the country afford it, while
+foreign nations are drilling their youth, teaching them to be ready to
+move in squads or masses, like the fist of a pugilist.  Skepsey left it
+to his look to speak his thought.  He saw an enemy in tobacco.  The
+drowsiness of beer had stretched various hulks under trees.  Ponderous
+cricket lumbered half-alive.  Flabby fun knocked-up a yell.  And it was
+rather vexatious to see girls dancing in good time to the band-music.
+One had a male-partner, who hopped his loutish burlesque of the thing he
+could not do.
+
+Apparently, too certainly, none but the girls had a notion of orderly
+muscular exercise.  Of what use are girls!  Girls have their one mission
+on earth; and let them be healthy by all means, for the sake of it; only,
+they should not seem to prove that old England is better represented on
+the female side.  Skepsey heard, with a nip of spite at his bosom, a
+small body of them singing in chorus as they walked in step, arm in arm,
+actually marched: and to the rearward, none of these girls heeding; there
+were the louts at their burlesque of jigs and fisticuffs!  'Cherry Ripe,'
+was the song.
+
+'It's delightful to hear them!' said Dartrey.
+
+Skepsey muttered jealously of their having been trained.
+
+The song, which drew Dartrey Fenellan to the quick of an English home,
+planted him at the same time in Africa to hear it.  Dewy on a parched
+forehead it fell, England the shedding heaven.
+
+He fetched a deep breath, as of gratitude for vital refreshment.  He had
+his thoughts upon the training of our English to be something besides the
+machinery of capitalists, and upon the country as a blessed mother
+instead of the most capricious of maudlin step-dames.
+
+He flicked his leg with the stick he carried, said: 'Your master's the
+man to make a change among them, old friend!' and strolled along to a
+group surrounding two fellows who shammed a bout at single-stick.
+Vacuity in the attack on either side, contributed to the joint success of
+the defense.  They paused under inspection; and Dartrey said: 'You're
+burning to give them a lesson, Skepsey.'
+
+Skepsey had no objection to his hero's doing so, though at his personal
+cost.
+
+The sticks were handed to them; the crowd increased; their rounders boys
+had spied them, and came trooping to the scene.  Skepsey was directed to
+hit in earnest.  His defensive attitude flashed, and he was at head and
+right and left leg, and giving point, recovering, thrusting madly, and
+again at shoulder and thigh, with bravos for reward of a man meaning
+business; until a topper on his hat, a cut over the right thigh, and the
+stick in his middlerib, told the spectators of a scientific adversary;
+and loudly now the gentleman was cheered.  An undercurrent of warm
+feeling ran for the plucky little one at it hot again in spite of the
+strokes, and when he fetched his master a handsome thud across the
+shoulder, and the gentleman gave up and complimented him, Skepsey had
+applause.
+
+He then begged his hero to put the previous couple in position, through
+a few of the opening movements.  They were horribly sheepish at first.
+Meantime two boys had got hold of sticks, and both had gone to work in
+Skepsey's gallant style; and soon one was howling.  He excused himself,
+because of the funny-bone, situated, in his case, higher than usual up
+the arm.  And now the pair of men were giving and taking cuts to make a
+rhinoceros caper.
+
+'Very well; begin that way; try what you can bear,' said Dartrey.
+
+Skepsey watched them, in felicity for love of the fray, pained by the
+disregard of science.
+
+Comments on the pretty play, indicating a reminiscent acquaintance with
+it, and the capacity for critical observations, were started.  Assaults,
+wonderful tricks of a slashing Life-Guardsman, one spectator had
+witnessed at an exhibition in a London hall.  Boxing too.  You may see
+displays of boxing still in places.  How about a prizefight?--With money
+on it?--Eh, but you don't expect men to stand up to be knocked into
+rumpsteaks for nothing?--No, but it's they there bets!--Right, and that's
+a game gone to ruin along of outsiders.--But it always was and it always
+will be popular with Englishmen!
+
+Great English names of young days, before the wintry shadow of the Law
+had blighted them, received their withered laurels.  Emulous boys were
+in the heroic posture.  Good! sparring does no hurt: Skepsey seized a
+likely lad, Dartrey another.  Nature created the Ring for them.  Now
+then, arms and head well up, chest hearty, shoulders down, out with the
+right fist, just below the level of the chin; out with the left fist
+farther, right out, except for that bit of curve; so, and draw it
+slightly back for wary-pussy at the spring.  Firm you stand, feeling
+the muscles of both legs, left half a pace ahead, right planted, both
+stringy.  None of your milk-pail looks; show us jaw, you bulldogs.  Now
+then, left from the shoulder, straight at right of head.--Good, and
+alacrity called on vigour in Skepsey's pupil; Dartrey's had the fist on
+his mouth before he could parry right arm up.  'Foul blow!' Dartrey
+cried.  Skepsey vowed to the contrary.  Dartrey reiterated his charge.
+Skepsey was a figure of negation, gesticulating and protesting.  Dartrey
+appealed tempestuously to the Ring; Skepsey likewise, in a tone of
+injury.  He addressed a remonstrance to Captain Dartrey.
+
+'Hang your captain, sir!  I call you a coward; come on,' said the
+resolute gentleman, already in ripe form for the attack.  His blue eyes
+were like the springing sunrise over ridges of the seas; and Skepsey
+jumped to his meaning.
+
+Boys and men were spectators of a real scientific set-to, a lovely show.
+They were half puzzled, it seemed so deadly.  And the little one got in
+his blows at the gentleman, who had to be hopping.  Only, the worse the
+gentleman caught it, the friendlier his countenance became.  That was the
+wonder, and that gave them the key.  But it was deliciously near to the
+real thing.
+
+Dartrey and Skepsey shook hands.
+
+'And now, you fellows, you're to know, that this is one of the champions;
+and you take your lesson from him and thank him,' Dartrey said, as he
+turned on his heel to strike and greet the flow from the house.
+
+'Dartrey come!'  Victor, Fenellan, Colney, had him by the hand in turn.
+Pure sweetness of suddenly awakened joy sat in Nataly's eyes as she swam
+to welcome him, Nesta moved a step, seemed hesitating, and she tripped
+forward.  'Dear Captain Dartrey!'
+
+He did not say: 'But what a change in you!'
+
+'It is blue-butterfly, all the same,' Nataly spoke to his look.
+
+Victor hurriedly pronounced the formal introduction between the Hon.
+Dudley Sowerby and Captain Dartrey Fenellan.  The bronze face and the
+milky bowed to one another ceremoniously; the latter faintly flushing.
+
+'So here you are at last,' Victor said.  'You stay with us.'
+
+'To-morrow or later, if you'll have me.  I go down to my people to-
+night.'
+
+'But you stay in England now?'  Nataly's voice wavered on the question.
+
+'There's a chance of my being off to Upper Burmah before the week's
+ended.'
+
+'Ah, dear, dear!' sighed Fenellan; 'and out of good comes evil!--as
+grandfather Deucalion exclaimed, when he gallantly handed up his dripping
+wife from the mud of the Deluge waters.  Do you mean to be running and
+Dewing it on for ever, with only a nod for friends, Dart?'
+
+'Lord, Simmy, what a sound of home there is in your old nonsense!'
+Dartrey said.
+
+His eyes of strong dark blue colour and the foreign swarthiness of his
+brows and cheeks and neck mixed the familiar and the strange, in the
+sight of the women who knew him.
+
+The bill-broker's fair-tressed young wife whispered of curiosity
+concerning him to Nataly.  He dressed like a sailor, he stood like a
+soldier: and was he married?  Yes, he was married.
+
+Mrs. Blathenoy imagined a something in Mrs. Radnor's tone.  She could
+account for it; not by the ordinary reading of the feminine in the
+feminine, but through a husband who professed to know secrets.  She was
+young in years and experience, ten months wedded, disappointedly
+awakened, enlivened by the hour, kindled by a novel figure of man,
+fretful for a dash of imprudence.  This Mrs. Radnor should be the one
+to second her very innocent turn for a galopade; her own position allowed
+of any little diverting jig or reel, or plunge in a bath--she required
+it, for the domestic Jacob Blathenoy was a dry chip: proved such, without
+a day's variation during the whole of the ten wedded months.  Nataly
+gratified her spoken wish.  Dartrey Fenellan bowed to the lady, and she
+withdrew him, seeing composedly that other and greater ladies had the
+wish ungratified.  Their husbands were not so rich as hers, and their
+complexions would hardly have pleased the handsome brown-faced officer so
+well.
+
+Banquet, equal to a blast of trumpet, was the detaining word for the
+multitude.  It circulated, one knows not how.  Eloquent as the whiffs to
+the sniffs (and nowhere is eloquence to match it, when the latter are
+sharpened from within to without), the word was very soon over the field.
+Mr. Carling may have helped; he had it from Fenellan; and he was among
+the principal groups, claiming or making acquaintances, as a lawyer
+should do.  The Concert was complimentarily a topic: Durandarte divine!--
+did not everybody think so?  Everybody did, in default of a term for
+overtopping it.  Our language is poor at hyperbole; our voices are
+stronger.  Gestures and heaven-sent eyeballs invoke to display the
+ineffable.  Where was Durandarte now?  Gone; already gone; off with the
+Luciani for evening engagements; he came simply to oblige his dear friend
+Mr. Radnor.  Cheque fifty guineas: hardly more on both sides than an
+exchange of smiles.  Ah, these merchant-princes!  What of Mr. Radnor's
+amateur instrumentalists?  Amateurs, they are not to be named: perfect
+musicians.  Mr. Radnor is the perfection of a host.  Yes, yes; Mrs.
+Radnor; Miss Radnor too: delicious voices; but what is it about Mr.
+Radnor so captivating!  He is not quite English, yet he is not at all
+foreign.  Is he very adventurous in business, as they say?
+
+'Soundest head in the City of London,' Mr. Blathenoy remarked.
+
+Sir Rodwell Blachington gave his nod.
+
+The crowd interjected, half-sighing.  We ought to be proud of such a man!
+Perhaps we are a trifle exaggerating, says its heart.  But that we are
+wholly grateful to him, is a distinct conclusion.  And he may be one of
+the great men of his time: he has a quite individual style of dress.
+
+Lady Rodwell Blachington observed to Colney Durance:
+
+'Mr. Radnor bids fair to become the idol of the English people.'
+
+'If he can prove himself to be sufficiently the dupe of the English
+people,' said Colney.
+
+'Idol--dupe?' interjected Sir Rodwell, and his eyebrows fixed at the
+perch of Colney's famous 'national interrogation' over vacancy of
+understanding, as if from the pull of a string.  He had his audience with
+him; and the satirist had nothing but his inner gush of acids at sight of
+a planted barb.
+
+Colney was asked to explain.  He never explained.  He performed a series
+of astonishing leaps, like the branchy baboon above the traveller's head
+in the tropical forest, and led them into the trap they assisted him to
+prepare for them.  'No humour, do you say?  The English have no humour?'
+a nephew of Lady Blachington's inquired of him, with polite pugnacity,
+and was cordially assured, that 'he vindicated them.'
+
+'And Altruistic!  another specimen of the modern coinage,' a classical
+Church dignitary, in grammarian disgust, remarked to a lady, as they
+passed.
+
+Colney pricked-up his ears.  It struck him that he might fish for
+suggestions in aid of the Grand Argument before the Elders of the Court
+of Japan.  Dr. Wardan, whose recognition he could claim, stated to him,
+that the lady and he were enumerating words of a doubtfully legitimate
+quality now being inflicted upon the language.
+
+'The slang from below is perhaps preferable?' said Colney.
+
+'As little-less.'
+
+'But a pirate-tongue, cut-off from its roots, must continue to practise
+piracy, surely, or else take reinforcements in slang, otherwise it is
+inexpressive of new ideas.'
+
+'Possibly the new ideas are best expressed in slang.'
+
+'If insular.  They will consequently be incommunicable to foreigners.
+You would, then, have us be trading with tokens instead of a precious
+currency?  Yet I cannot perceive the advantage of letting our ideas be
+clothed so racy of the obscener soil; considering the pretensions of the
+English language to become the universal.  If we refuse additions from
+above, they force themselves on us from below.'
+
+Dr. Wardan liked the frame of the observations, disliked the substance.
+
+'One is to understand that the English language has these pretensions?'
+he said:--he minced in his manner, after the well-known mortar-board and
+tassel type; the mouthing of a petrifaction: clearly useless to the
+pleadings of the patriotic Dr. Bouthoin and his curate.
+
+He gave no grip to Colney, who groaned at cheap Donnish sarcasm, and let
+him go, after dealing him a hard pellet or two in a cracker-covering.
+
+There was Victor all over the field netting his ephemerae!  And he who
+feeds on them, to pay a price for their congratulations and flatteries,
+he is one of them himself!
+
+Nesta came tripping from the Rev. Septimus Barmby.  'Dear Mr. Durance,
+where is Captain Dartrey?'
+
+Mrs. Blathenoy had just conducted her husband through a crowd, for an
+introduction of him to Captain Dartrey.  That was perceptible.
+
+Dudley Sowerby followed Nesta closely: he struck across the path of the
+Rev. Septimus: again he had the hollow of her ear at his disposal.
+
+'Mr. Radnor was excellent.  He does everything consummately: really, we
+are all sensible of it.  I am.  He must lead us in a symphony.  These
+light "champagne overtures" of French composers, as Mr. Fenellan calls
+them, do not bring out his whole ability:--Zampa, Le Pre aux clercs,
+Masaniello, and the like.'
+
+'Your duet together went well.'
+
+'Thanks to you--to you.  You kept us together.'
+
+'Papa was the runaway or strain-the-leash, if there was one.'
+
+'He is impetuous, he is so fervent.  But, Miss Radnor, I could not be the
+runaway-with you .  .  .  with you at the piano.  Indeed, I .  .  .
+shall we stroll down?  I love the lake.'
+
+'You will hear the bell for your cold dinner very soon.'
+
+'I am not hungry.  I would so much rather talk--hear you.  But you are
+hungry?  You have been singing twice: three times!  Opera singers, they
+say, eat hot suppers; they drink stout.  And I never heard your voice
+more effective.  Yours is a voice that .  .  .  something of the feeling
+one has in hearing cathedral voices: carry one up.  I remember, in
+Dresden, once, a Fraulein Kuhnstreich, a prodigy, very young, considering
+her accomplishments.  But it was not the same.'
+
+Nesta wondered at Dartrey Fenellan for staying so long with Mr. and Mrs.
+Blathenoy.
+
+'Ah, Mr. Sowerby, if I am to have flattery, I cannot take it as a
+milliner's dumb figure wears the beautiful dress; I must point out my
+view of some of my merits.'
+
+'Oh!  do, I beg, Miss .  .  .  You have a Christian name and I too: and
+once .  .  .  not Mr. Sowerby: yes, it was Dudley!,
+
+'Quite accidentally, and a world of pardons entreated.'
+
+'And Dudley begged Dudley might be Dudley always !'
+
+He was deepening to the Barmby intonation--apparently Cupid's; but a
+shade more airily Pagan, not so fearfully clerical.
+
+Her father had withdrawn Dartrey Fenellan from Mr. and Mrs. Blathenoy.
+Dr. Schlesien was bowing with Dartrey.
+
+'And if Durandarte would only--but you are one with Miss Graves to
+depreciate my Durandarte, in favour of the more classical Jachimo; whom
+we all admire; but you shall be just,' said she, and she pouted.  She had
+seen her father plant Dartrey Fenellan in the midst of a group of City
+gentlemen.
+
+Simeon touched among them to pluck at his brother.  He had not a chance;
+he retired, and swam into the salmon-net of seductive Mrs. Blathenoy's
+broad bright smile.
+
+'It's a matter of mines, and they're hovering in the attitude of the
+query, like corkscrews over a bottle, profoundly indifferent to blood-
+relationships,' he said to her.
+
+'Pray, stay and be consoled by me,' said the fair young woman.  'You are
+to point me out all the distinguished people.  Is it true, that your
+brother has left the army?'
+
+'Dartrey no longer wears the red.  Here comes Colonel Corfe, who does.
+England has her army still!'
+
+'His wife persuaded him?'
+
+'You see he is wearing the black.'
+
+'For her?  How very very sad!  Tell me--what a funnily dressed woman
+meeting that gentleman!'
+
+'Hush--a friend of the warrior.  Splendid weather, Colonel Corfe.'
+
+'Superb toilettes!' The colonel eyed Mrs. Blathenoy dilatingly, advanced,
+bowed, and opened the siege.
+
+She decided a calculation upon his age, made a wall of it, smilingly
+agreed with his encomium of the Concert, and toned her voice to
+Fenellan's comprehension: 'Did it occur recently?'
+
+'Months; in Africa; I haven't the date.'
+
+'Such numbers of people one would wish to know!  Who are those ladies
+holding a Court, where Mr. Radnor is?'
+
+'Lady Carmine, Lady Swanage--if it is your wish?' interposed the colonel.
+
+She dealt him a forgiving smile.  'And that pleasant-looking old
+gentleman?'
+
+Colonel Corfe drew-up.  Fenellan said: 'Are we veterans at forty or so?'
+
+'Well, it 's the romance, perhaps!'  She raised her shoulders.
+
+The colonel's intelligence ran a dog's nose for a lady's interjections.
+'The romance?  .  .  .  at forty, fifty?  gone?  Miss Julinks, the great
+heiress and a beauty; has chosen him over the heads of all the young men
+of his time.  Cranmer Lotsdale.  Most romantic history!'
+
+'She's in love with that, I suppose.'
+
+'Now you direct my attention to him,' said Fenellan, 'the writing of the
+romantic history has made the texture look a trifle thready.  You have a
+terrible eye.'
+
+It was thrown to where the person stood who had first within a few
+minutes helped her to form critical estimates of men, more consciously to
+read them.
+
+'Your brother stays in England?'
+
+'The fear is, that he's off again.'
+
+'Annoying for you.  If I had a brother, I would not let him go.'
+
+'How would you detain him?'
+
+'Locks and bolts, clock wrong, hands and arms, kneeling--the fourth act
+of the Huguenots!'
+
+'He went by way of the window, I think.  But that was a lover.'
+
+'Oh! well!' she flushed.  She did not hear the 'neglected and astonished
+colonel speak, and she sought diversion in saying to Fenellan: 'So many
+people of distinction are assembled here to-day!  Tell me, who is that
+pompous gentleman, who holds his arms up doubled, as he walks?'
+
+'Like flappers of a penguin: and advances in jerks: he is head of the
+great Firm of Quatley Brothers: Sir Abraham: finances or farms one of the
+South American Republics: we call him, Pride of Port.  He consumes it and
+he presents it.'
+
+'And who is that little man, who stops everybody?'
+
+'People of distinction indeed!  That little man--is your upper lip
+underrateing him?  .  .  .  When a lady's lip is erratically disdainful,
+it suggests a misuse of a copious treasury, deserving to be mulcted,
+punished--how?--who can say?--that little man, now that little man, with
+a lift of his little finger, could convulse the Bacon Market!'
+
+Mrs. Blathenoy shook.  Hearing Colonel Corfe exclaim:
+
+'Bacon Market!' she let fly a peal.  Then she turned to a fresh
+satellite, a round and a ruddy, 'at her service ever,' Mr. Beaves
+Urmsing, and repeated Fenellan's words.  He, in unfeigned wonderment at
+such unsuspected powers, cried: 'Dear me!' and stared at the little man,
+making the pretty lady's face a twinkling dew.
+
+He had missed the Concert.  Was it first-rate?  Ecstasy answered in the
+female voice.
+
+'Hem'd fool I am to keep appointments!' he muttered.
+
+She reproved him: 'Fie, Mr. Urmsing; it's the making of them, not the
+keeping!'
+
+'Ah, my dear ma'am, if I'd had Blathenoy's luck when he made a certain
+appointment.  And he was not so much older than me?  The old ones get the
+prizes!'
+
+Mr. Beaves Urmsing prompted Colonel Corfe to laugh in triumph.  The
+colonel's eyebrows were up in fixity over sleepy lids.  He brightened to
+propose the conducting of the pretty woman to the banquet.
+
+'We shall see them going in,' said she.  'Mr. Radnor has a French cook,
+who does wonders.  But I heard him asking for Mr. Beaves Urmsing.  I'm
+sure he expected The Marigolds at his Concert.'
+
+'Anything to oblige the company,' said the rustic ready chorister,
+clearing his throat.
+
+The lady's feet were bent in the direction of a grassy knoll, where
+sunflowers, tulips, dahlias, peonies, of the sex eclipsed at a distance
+its roses and lilies.  Fenellan saw Dartrey, still a centre of the
+merchantmen, strolling thither.
+
+'And do you know, your brother is good enough to dine with us next week,
+Thursday, down here,' she murmured.  'I could venture to command?--if you
+are not induced.'
+
+'Whichever word applies to a faithful subject.'
+
+'I do so wish your brother had not left the army!'
+
+'You have one son of Mars.'
+
+Her eyes took the colonel up to cast him down: he was not the antidote.
+She said to him: 'Luciani's voice wears better than her figure.'
+
+The colonel replied: 'I remember,' and corrected himself, 'at Eton, in
+jackets: she was not so particularly slim; never knew how to dress.  You
+beat Italians there!  She moved one as a youngster.'
+
+'Eton boys are so susceptible!'
+
+'Why, hulloa, don't I remember her coming out!--and do you mean to tell
+me,' Mr. Beaves Urmsing brutally addressed the colonel, 'that you were at
+Eton when .  .  . why, what age do you give the poor woman, then!'
+He bellowed, 'Eh?' as it were a bull crowing.
+
+The colonel retreated to one of his defensive corners.  'I am not aware
+that I meant to tell you anything.'
+
+Mr. Beaves Urmsing turned square-breasted on Fenellan: 'Fellow's a born
+donkey!'
+
+'And the mother lived?' said Fenellan.
+
+Mr. Beaves Urmsing puffed with wrath at the fellow.
+
+Five minutes later, in the midst of the group surrounding and
+felicitating Victor, he had sight of Fenellan conversing with fair ones,
+and it struck a light in him; he went three steps backward, with shouts.
+'Dam funny fellow!  eh?  who is he?  I must have that man at my table.
+Worth fifty Colonel Jackasses!  And I 've got a son in the Guards: and as
+much laugh in him, he 's got, as a bladder.  But we'll make a party, eh,
+Radnor?  with that friend o' yours.  Dam funny fellow!  and precious
+little of it going on now among the young lot.  They're for seeing ghosts
+and gaping their jaws; all for the quavers instead of the capers.'
+
+He sounded and thrummed his roguish fling-off for the capers.  A second
+glimpse of Fenellan agitated the anecdote, as he called it, seizing
+Victor's arm, to have him out of earshot of the ladies.  Delivery,
+not without its throes, was accomplished, but imperfectly, owing to
+sympathetic convulsions, under which Mr. Beaves Urmsing's countenance was
+crinkled of many colours, as we see the Spring rhubarb-leaf.  Unable to
+repeat the brevity of Fenellan's rejoinder, he expatiated on it to convey
+it, swearing that it was the kind of thing done in the old days, when men
+were witty dogs:--'pat! and pat back! as in the pantomime.'
+
+'Repartee !' said Victor.  'He has it.  You shall know him.  You're the
+man for him.'
+
+'He for me, that he is!--"Hope the mother's doing well?  My card":--eh?
+Grave as an owl!  Look, there goes the donkey, lady to right and left,
+all ears for him--ha!  ha!  I must have another turn with your friend.
+"Mother lived, did she?"  Dam funny fellow, all of the olden time!  And a
+dinner, bachelor dinner, six of us, at my place, next week, say
+Wednesday, half-past six, for a long evening--flowing bowl--eh, shall it
+be?'
+
+Nesta came looking to find her Captain Dartrey.
+
+Mr. Beaves Urmsing grew courtly of the olden time.  He spied Colonel
+Corfe anew, and 'Donkey!' rose to split the roar at his mouth, and full
+of his anecdote, he pursued some congenial acquaintances, crying to his
+host: 'Wednesday, mind!  eh?  by George, your friend's gizzarded me for
+the day!'
+
+Plumped with the rich red stream of life, this last of the squires of old
+England thumped along among the guests, a very tuning-fork to keep them
+at their pitch of enthusiasm.  He encountered Mr. Caddis, and it was an
+encounter.  Mr. Caddis represented his political opinions; but here was
+this cur of a Caddis whineing his niminy note from his piminy nob, when
+he was asked for his hearty echo of the praises of this jolly good fellow
+come to waken the neighbourhood, to be a blessing, a blazing hearth, a
+fall of manna:--and thank the Lord for him, you desertdog!  'He 's a
+merchant prince, and he's a prince of a man, if you're for titles.  Eh?
+you "assent to my encomiums."  You'll be calling me Mr. Speaker next.
+Hang me, Caddis, if those Parliamentary benches of yours aren't freezing
+you from your seat up, and have got to your jaw--my belief!'
+
+Mr. Caddis was left reflecting, that we have, in the dispensations of
+Providence, when we have a seat, to submit to castigations from butcherly
+men unaccountably commissioned to solidify the seat.  He could have
+preached a discourse upon Success, to quiet the discontentment of the
+unseated.  And our world of seats oddly gained, quaintly occupied,
+maliciously beset, insensately envied, needs the discourse.  But it was
+not delivered, else would it have been here written down without mercy,
+as a medical prescript, one of the grand specifics.  He met Victor, and,
+between his dread of him and the counsels of a position subject to
+stripes, he was a genial thaw.  Victor beamed; for Mr. Caddis had
+previously stood eminent as an iceberg of the Lakelands' party.  Mr.
+Inchling and Mr. Caddis were introduced.  The former in Commerce, the
+latter in Politics, their sustaining boast was, the being our stable
+Englishmen; and at once, with cousinly minds, they fell to chatting upon
+the nothings agreeably and seriously.  Colney Durance forsook a set of
+ladies for fatter prey, and listened to them.  What he said, Victor did
+not hear.  The effect was always to be seen, with Inchling under Colney.
+Fenellan did better service, really good service.
+
+Nataly played the heroine she was at heart.  Why think of her as having
+to act a character!  Twice had Carling that afternoon, indirectly and
+directly, stated Mrs. Burman to be near the end we crape a natural, a
+defensible, satisfaction to hear of:--not wishing it--poor woman!--but
+pardonably, before man and all the angels, wishing, praying for the
+beloved one to enter into her earthly peace by the agency of the other's
+exit into her heavenly.
+
+Fenellan and Colney came together, and said a word apiece of their
+friend.
+
+'In his element!  The dear old boy has the look of a goldfish, king of
+his globe.'
+
+'The dear old boy has to me the look of a pot on the fire, with a loose
+lid.'
+
+I may have the summons from Themison to-morrow, Victor thought.  The
+success of the day, was a wine that rocked the soberest of thoughts.
+For, strange to confess, ever since the fall on London Bridge, his heart,
+influenced in some degree by Nataly's depression perhaps, had been
+shadowed by doubts of his infallible instinct for success.  Here, at a
+stroke, and before entering the house, he had the whole neighbourhood
+about him: he could feel that he and Nataly stood in the minds of the
+worthy people variously with the brightness if not with the warmth
+distinguishable in the bosom of Beaves Urmsing--the idea of whom gave
+Lakelands an immediate hearth-glow.
+
+Armandine was thirteen minutes, by his watch, behind the time she had
+named.  Small blame to her.  He excused her to Lady Carmine, Lady
+Swanage, Lady Blachington, Mrs. Fanning, Sir Abraham Quatley, Mr. Danny
+(of Bacon fame) and the rest of the group surrounding Nataly on the mound
+leftward of the white terraces descending to the lake; where she stood
+beating her foot fretfully at the word brought by Nesta, that Dartrey
+Fenellan had departed.  It was her sunshine departed.  But she went
+through her task of conversing amiably.  Colney, for a wonder, consented
+to be useful in assisting Fenellan to relate stories of French Cooks;
+which were, like the Royal Hanoverian oyster, of an age for offering
+acceptable flavour to English hearers.  Nesta drew her mother's attention
+to Priscilla Graves and Skepsey; the latter bending head and assenting.
+Nataly spoke of the charm of Priscilla's voice that day, in her duet with
+the Rev. Septimus.  Mr. Pempton looked; he saw that Priscilla was
+proselytizing.  She was perfection to him but for one blotting thing.
+With grief on his eyelids, he said to Nataly or to himself: 'Meat!'
+
+'Dear friend, don't ride your hobby over us,' she replied.
+
+'But it's with that object they mount it,' said Victor.
+
+The greater ladies of the assembly were quite ready to accuse the
+sections, down to the individuals, of the social English (reserving our
+elect) of an itch to be tyrants.
+
+Colney was apologizing for them, with his lash: 'It's merely the sensible
+effect of a want of polish of the surface when they rub together.'
+
+And he heard Carling exclaim to Victor: 'How comes the fellow here!'
+
+Skepsey had rushed across an open space to intercept a leisurely
+progressive man, whose hat was of the shape Victor knew; and the man wore
+the known black gaiters.  In appearance, he had the likeness of a fallen
+parson.
+
+Carling and Victor crossed looks that were questions carrying their
+answers.
+
+Nataly's eyes followed Victor's.  'Who is the man?' she said; and she got
+no reply beyond a perky sparkle in his gaze.
+
+Others were noticing the man, who was trying to pass by Skepsey, now on
+his right side, now on his left.
+
+'There'll be no stopping him,' Carling said, and he slipped to the rear.'
+
+At this juncture, Armandine's mellow bell proclaimed her readiness.
+
+Victor rubbed the back of his head.  Nataly asked him: 'Dear, is it that
+man?'
+
+He nodded scantly: 'Expected, expected.  I think we have our summons from
+Armandine.  One moment--poor soul! poor soul! Lady Carmine--Sir Abraham
+Quatley.  Will you lead?  Lady Blachington, I secure you.  One moment.'
+
+He directed Nataly to pair a few of the guests; he hurried down the slope
+of sward.
+
+Nataly applied to Colney Durance.  'Do you know the man?--is it that
+man?'
+
+Colney rejoined: 'The man's name is Jarniman.'
+
+Armandine's bell swung melodiously.  The guests had grouped, thickening
+for the stream to procession.  Mrs. Blathenoy claimed Fenellan; she
+requested him to tell her whether he had known Mrs. Victor Radnor many
+years.  She mused.  'You like her?'
+
+'One likes one's dearest of friends among women, does one not?'
+
+The lady nodded to his response.  'And your brother?'
+
+'Dartrey is devoted to her.'
+
+'I am sure,' said she, 'your brother is a chivalrous gentleman.  I like
+her too.'  She came to her sentiment through the sentiment of the
+chivalrous gentleman.  Sinking from it, she remarked that Mr. Radnor was
+handsome still.  Fenellan commended the subject to her, as one to
+discourse of when she met Dartrey.  A smell of a trap-hatch, half-open,
+afflicted and sharpened him.  It was Blathenoy's breath: husbands of
+young wives do these villanies, for the sake of showing their knowledge.
+Fenellan forbore to praise Mrs. Victor: he laid his colours on Dartrey.
+The lady gave ear till she reddened.  He meant no harm, meant nothing but
+good; and he was lighting the most destructive of our lower fires.
+
+Visibly, that man Jarniman was disposed of with ease.  As in the street-
+theatres of crowing Punch, distance enlisted pantomime to do the
+effective part of the speeches.  Jarniman's hat was off, he stood bent,
+he delivered his message.  He was handed over to Skepsey's care for the
+receiving of meat and drink.  Victor returned; he had Lady Blachington's
+hand on his arm; he was all hers, and in the heart of his company of
+guests at the same time.  Eyes that had read him closely for years, were
+unable to spell a definite signification on his face, below the
+overflowing happiness of the hospitable man among contented guests.  He
+had in fact something within to enliven him; and that was the more than
+suspicion, amounting to an odour of certainty, that Armandine intended
+one of her grand surprises for her master, and for the hundred and fifty
+or so to be seated at her tables in the unwarmed house of Lakelands.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+CONCERNS THE INTRUSION OF JARNIMAN
+
+Armandine did her wonders.  There is not in the wide range of the Muses a
+more responsive instrument than man to his marvellous cook; and if his
+notes were but as flowing as his pedals are zealous, we should be carried
+on the tale of the enthusiasm she awakened, away from the rutted
+highroad, where History now thinks of tightening her girdle for an
+accelerated pace.
+
+The wonders were done: one hundred and seventy guests plenteously fed at
+tables across the great Concert Hall, down a length of the conservatory-
+glass, on soups, fish, meats, and the kitchen-garden, under play of
+creative sauces, all in the persuasive steam of savouriness; every dish,
+one may say, advancing, curtseying, swimming to be your partner, instead
+of passively submitting to the eye of appetite, consenting to the teeth,
+as that rather melancholy procession of the cold, resembling established
+spinsters thrice-corseted in decorum, will appear to do.  Whether
+Armandine had the thought or that she simply acted in conformity with
+a Frenchwoman's direct good sense, we do require to smell a sort of
+animation in the meats we consume.  We are still perhaps traceably
+related to the Adamite old-youngster just on his legs, who betrayed at
+every turn his Darwinian beginnings, and relished a palpitating
+unwillingness in the thing refreshing him; only we young-oldsters cherish
+the milder taste for willingness, with a throb of the vanquished in it.
+And a seeming of that we get from the warm roast.  The banquet to be
+fervently remembered, should smoke, should send out a breath to meet us.
+Victor's crowded saloon-carriage was one voice of eulogy, to raise
+Armandine high as the finale rockets bursting over Wrensham Station at
+the start Londonward.  How had she managed?  We foolishly question the
+arts of magicians.
+
+Mr. Pempton was an apparent dissentient, as the man must be who is half a
+century ahead of his fellows in humaneness, and saddened by the display
+of slaughtered herds and their devourers.  He had picked out his
+vegetable and farinaceous morsels, wherever he could get them
+uncontaminated; enough for sustenance; and the utmost he could show was,
+that he did not complain. When mounted and ridden by the satirist, in
+wrath at him for systematically feasting the pride of the martyr on the
+maceration of his animal part, he put on his martyr's pride, which
+assumed a perfect contentment in the critical depreciation of opposing
+systems: he was drawn to state, as he had often done, that he considered
+our animal part shamefully and dangerously over nourished, and that much
+of the immorality of the world was due to the present excessive
+indulgence in meats. 'Not in drink?' Miss Graves inquired.  'No,' he said
+boldly; 'not equally; meats are more insidious.  I say nothing of taking
+life--of fattening for that express purpose: diseases of animals: bad
+blood made: cruelty superinduced: it will be seen to be, it will be
+looked back on, as a form of, a second stage of, cannibalism.  Let that
+pass.  I say, that for excess in drinking, the penalty is paid instantly,
+or at least on the morrow.'
+
+'Paid by the drunkard's wife, you should say.'
+
+'Whereas intemperance in eating, corrupts constitutionally, more
+spiritually vitiates, we think: on the whole, gluttony is the least-
+generous of the vices.'
+
+Colney lured Mr. Pempton through a quagmire of the vices to declare,
+that it brutalized; and stammeringly to adopt the suggestion, that our
+breeding of English ladies--those lights of the civilized world--can
+hardly go with a feeding upon flesh of beasts.  Priscilla regretted that
+champagne should have to be pleaded in excuse of impertinences to her
+sex.  They were both combative, nibbed for epigram, edged to inflict
+wounds; and they were set to shudder openly at one another's practises;
+they might have exposed to Colney which of the two maniacal sections of
+his English had the vaster conceit of superiority in purity; they were
+baring themselves, as it were with a garment flung-off at each retort.
+He reproached them for undermineing their countrymen; whose Falstaff
+panics demanded blood of animals to restore them; and their periods of
+bragging, that they should brandify their wits to imagine themselves
+Vikings.
+
+Nataly interposed.  She was vexed with him.  He let his eyelids drop: but
+the occasion for showing the prickliness of the bristly social English,
+could not be resisted.  Dr. Peter Yatt was tricked to confess, that small
+annoyances were, in his experience, powerful on the human frame; and Dr.
+John Cormyn was very neatly brought round to assure him he was mistaken
+if he supposed the homoeopathic doctor who smoked was exercising a
+destructive influence on the efficacy of the infinitesimal doses he
+prescribed; Dr. Yatt chuckled a laugh at globules; Dr. Cormyn at patients
+treated as horses; while Mr. Catkin was brought to praise the smoke of
+tobacco as our sanctuary from the sex; and Mr. Peridon quietly denied,
+that the taking of it into his nostrils from the puffs of his friend
+caused him sad silences: Nesta flew to protect the admirer of her beloved
+Louise.  Her subsiding young excitement of the day set her Boating on
+that moony melancholy in Mr. Peridon.
+
+No one could understand the grounds for Colney's more than usual
+waspishness.  He trotted out the fulgent and tonal Church of the Rev.
+Septimus; the skeleton of worship, so truly showing the spirit, in that
+of Dudley Sowerby's family; maliciously admiring both; and he had a spar
+with Fenellan, ending in a snarl and a shout.  Victor said to him: 'Yes,
+here, as much as you like, old Colney, but I tell you, you've staggered
+that poor woman Lady Blachington to-day, and her husband too; and I don't
+know how many besides.  What the pleasure of it can be, I can't guess.'
+
+'Nor I,' said Fenellan, 'but I'll own I feel envious; like the girl among
+a family of boys I knew, who were all of them starved in their infancy by
+a miserly father, that gave them barely a bit of Graves to eat and not a
+drop of Pempton to drink; and on the afternoon of his funeral, I found
+them in the drawing-room, four lank fellows, heels up, walking on their
+hands, from long practice; and the girl informed me, that her brothers
+were able so to send the little blood they had in their bodies to their
+brains, and always felt quite cheerful for it, happy, and empowered to
+deal with the problems of the universe; as they couldn't on their legs;
+but she, poor thing, was forbidden to do the same!  And I'm like her.  I
+care for decorum too much to get the brain to act on Colney's behaviour;
+but I see it enraptures him and may be comprehensible to the topsy-
+turvy.'
+
+Victor rubbed hands.  It was he who filled Colney's bag of satiric spite.
+In addition to the downright lunacy of the courting of country society,
+by means of the cajolements witnessed this day, a suspicion that Victor
+was wearing a false face over the signification--of Jarniman's visit and
+meant to deceive the trustful and too-devoted loving woman he seemed
+bound to wreck, irritated the best of his nature.  He had a resolve to
+pass an hour with the couple, and speak and insist on hearing plain words
+before the night had ended.  But Fenellan took it out of him.  Victor's
+show of a perfect contentment emulating Pempton's, incited Colney to some
+of his cunning rapier-thrusts with his dancing adversary; and the heat
+which is planted in us for the composition: of those cool epigrams, will
+not allow plain words to follow.  Or, handing him over to the police of
+the Philistines, you may put it, that a habit of assorting spices will
+render an earnest simplicity distasteful.  He was invited by Nataly to
+come home with them; her wish for his presence, besides personal, was
+moved by an intuition, that his counsel might specially benefit them.
+He shrugged; he said he had work at his chambers.
+
+'Work!' Victor ejaculated: he never could reach to a right comprehension
+of labour, in regard to the very unremunerative occupation of literature.
+Colney he did not want, and he let him go, as Nataly noticed, without a
+sign of the reluctance he showed when the others, including Fenellan,
+excused themselves.
+
+'So! we're alone?' he said, when the door of the hall had closed on them.
+He kept Nesta talking of the success of the day until she, observing her
+mother's look, simulated the setting-in of a frenzied yawn.  She was
+kissed, and she tripped to her bed.
+
+'Now we are alone,' Nataly said.
+
+'Well, dear, and the day was, you must own .  .  .  ' he sought to trifle
+with her heavy voice; but she recalled him: 'Victor!' and the naked
+anguish in her cry of his name was like a foreign world threatening the
+one he filled.
+
+'Ah, yes;  that man, that Jarniman.  You saw him, I remember.  You
+recollected him?--stouter than he was.  In her service ever since.  Well,
+a little drop of bitter, perhaps: no harm, tonic.'
+
+'Victor, is she very ill?'
+
+'My love, don't feel at your side: she is ill, ill, not the extreme case:
+not yet: old and ill.  I told Skepsey to give the man refreshment: he had
+to do his errand.'
+
+'What?  why did he come?'
+
+'Curious; he made acquaintance with Skepsey, and appears to have
+outwitted poor Skepsey, as far as I see it.  But if that woman thinks of
+intimidating me now--!'  His eyes brightened; he had sprung from
+evasions.  'Living in flagrant sin, she says: you and I!  She will not
+have it; warns me.  Heard this day at noon of company at Lakelands.
+Jarniman off at once.  Are to live in obscurity;--you and I!  if
+together!  Dictates from her death-bed-I suppose her death-bed.'
+
+'Dearest,' Nataly pressed hand on her left breast, 'may we not think that
+she may be right?'
+
+'An outrageous tyranny of a decrepit woman naming herself wife when she
+is only a limpet of vitality, with drugs for blood, hanging-on to blast
+the healthy and vigorous!  I remember old Colney's once, in old days,
+calling that kind of marriage a sarcophagus.  It was to me.  There I lay
+--see myself lying! wasting!  Think what you can good of her, by all
+means!  From her bed! despatches that Jarniman to me from her bedside,
+with the word, that she cannot in her conscience allow--what imposition
+was it I practised?  .  .  .  flagrant sin?--it would have been an
+infinitely viler .  .  .  .  She is the cause of suffering enough: I bear
+no more from her; I've come to the limit.  She has heard of Lakelands:
+she has taken one of her hatreds to the place.  She might have written,
+might have sent me a gentleman, privately.  No: it must be done in
+dramatic style-for effect: her confidential--lawyer?--doctor?--butler!
+Perhaps to frighten me:--the boy she knew, and--poor soul!  I don't mean
+to abuse her: but such conduct as this is downright brutal.  I laugh at
+it, I snap my fingers.  I can afford to despise it.  Only I do say it
+deserves to be called abominable.'
+
+'Victor, has she used a threat?'
+
+'Am I brought to listen to any of her threats!--Funny thing, I 'm certain
+that woman never can think of me except as the boy she knew.  I saw her
+first when she was first a widow.  She would keep talking to me of the
+seductions of the metropolis--kept informing me I was a young man .  .  .
+shaking her head.  I 've told you.  She--well, I know we are mixtures,
+women as well as men.  I can, I hope, grant the same--I believe I can--
+allowances to women as to men; we are poor creatures, all of using one
+sense: though I won't give Colney his footing; there's a better way of
+reading us.  I hold fast to Nature.  No violation of Nature, my good
+Colney!  We can live the lives of noble creatures; and I say that
+happiness was meant for us:--just as, when you sit down to your dinner,
+you must do it cheerfully, and you make good blood: otherwise all's
+wrong.  There's the right answer to Colney!  But when a woman like that
+.  .  .  .  and marries a boy: well, twenty-one--not quite that: and an
+innocent, a positive innocent--it may seem incredible, after a term of
+school-life: it was a fact: I can hardly understand it myself when I look
+back.  Marries him!  And then sets to work to persecute him, because he
+has blood in his veins, because he worships beauty; because he seeks a
+real marriage, a real mate.  And, I say it! let the world take its own
+view, the world is wrong! because he preferred a virtuous life to the
+kind of life she would, she must--why, necessarily!--have driven him
+to, with a mummy's grain of nature in his body.  And I am made of flesh,
+I admit it.'
+
+'Victor, dearest, her threat concerns only your living at Lakelands.'
+
+'Pray, don't speak excitedly, my love,' he replied to the woman whose
+tones had been subdued to scarce more than waver.  'You see how I meet
+it: water off a duck's back, or Indian solar beams on the skin of a
+Hindoo!  I despise it hardly worth contempt;--But, come: our day was a
+good one.  Fenellan worked well.  Old Colney was Colney Durance, of
+course.  He did no real mischief.'
+
+'And you will not determine to enter Lakelands--not yet, dear?' said
+Nataly.
+
+'My own girl, leave it all to me.'
+
+'But, Victor, I must, must know.'
+
+'See the case.  You have lots of courage.  We can't withdraw.  Her
+intention is mischief.  I believe the woman keeps herself alive for it:
+we've given her another lease!--though it can only be for a very short
+time; Themison is precise; Carling too.  If we hold back--I have great
+faith in Themison--the woman's breath on us is confirmed.  We go down,
+then; complete the furnishing, quite leisurely; accept--listen--accept
+one or two invitations: impossible to refuse!--but they are accepted!
+--and we defy her: a crazy old creature: imagines herself the wife of the
+ex-Premier, widow of Prince Le Boo, engaged to the Chinese Ambassador, et
+caetera.  Leave the tussle with that woman to me.  No, we don't repeat
+the error of Crayc Farm and Creckholt.  And here we have stout friends.
+Not to speak of Beaver Urmsing: a picture of Old Christmas England!  You
+took to him?--must have taken to Beaver Urmsing!  The Marigolds!  And Sir
+Rodwell and Lady Blachington are altogether above the mark of Sir
+Humphrey and Lady Pottil, and those half and half Mountneys.  There's a
+warm centre of home in Lakelands.  But I know my Nataly: she is thinking
+of our girl.  Here is the plan: we stand our ground: my dear soul won't
+forsake me only there's the thought of Fredi, in the event .  .  .
+improbable enough.  I lift Fredi out of the atmosphere awhile; she goes
+to my cousins the Duvidney ladies.'
+
+Nataly was hit by a shot.  'Can you imagine it, Victor?'
+
+'Regard it as done.'
+
+'They will surely decline!'
+
+'Their feeling for General Radnor is a worship.'
+
+'All the more .  .  . ?'
+
+'The son inherits it.  He goes to them personally.  Have you ever known
+me personally fail?  Fredi stays at Moorsedge for a month or two.
+Dorothea and Virginia Duvidney will give her a taste of a new society;
+good for the girl.  All these little shiftings can be turned to good.
+Meantime, I say, we stand our ground: but you are not to be worried; for
+though we have gone too far to recede, we need not and we will not make
+the entry into Lakelands until--you know: that is, auspiciously, to suit
+you in every way.  Thus I provide to meet contingencies.  What one may
+really fancy is, that the woman did but threaten.  There's her point of
+view to be considered: silly, crazy; but one sees it.  We are not sure
+that she struck a blow at Craye or Creckholt.  I wonder she never wrote.
+She was frightened, when she came to manage her property, of signing her
+name to anything.  Absurd, that sending of Jarniman!  However, it's her
+move; we make a corresponding disposition of our chessmen.'
+
+'And I am to lose my Nesta for a month?' Nataly said, after catching here
+and there at the fitful gleams of truce or comfort dropped from his
+words.  And simultaneously, the reproach of her mind to her nature for
+again and so constantly yielding to the domination of his initiative:
+unable to find the words, even the ideas, to withstand him,--brought big
+tears.  Angry at herself both for the internal feebleness and the
+exhibition of it, she blinked and begged excuse.  There might be nothing
+that should call her to resist him.  She could not do much worse than she
+had done to-day.  The reflection, that to-day she had been actually
+sustained by the expectation of a death to come, diminished her estimate
+of to-morrow's burden on her endurance, in making her seem a less
+criminal woman, who would have no such expectation: which was virtually
+a stab at a fellow creature's future.  Her head was acute to work in the
+direction of the casuistries and the sensational webs and films.  Facing
+Victor, it was a block.
+
+But the thought came: how could she meet those people about Lakelands,
+without support of the recent guilty whispers!  She said coldly, her
+heart shaking her: 'You think there has been a recovery?'
+
+'Invalids are up and down.  They are--well, no; I should think she dreads
+the .  .  .'  he kept 'surgeon' out of hearing.  'Or else she means this
+for the final stroke: "though I'm lying here, I can still make him feel."
+That, or--poor woman--she has her notions of right and wrong.'
+
+'Could we not now travel for a few weeks, Victor?'
+
+'Certainly, dear; we will, after we have kept our engagements to dine--
+I accepted--with the Blathenoys, the Blachingtons, Beaver Urmsing.'
+
+Nataly's vision of the peaceful lost little dairy cottage swelled to
+brilliance, like the large tear at the fall; darkening under her present
+effort to comprehend the necessity it was for him to mix and be foremost
+with the world.  Unable to grasp it perfectly in mind, her compassionate
+love embraced it: she blamed herself, for being the obstruction to him.
+
+'Very well,' she said on a sigh.  'Then we shall not have to let our girl
+go from us?'
+
+'Just a few weeks.  In the middle of dinner, I scribbled a telegram to
+the Duvidneys, for Skepsey to take.'
+
+'Speaking of Nesta?'
+
+'Of my coming to-morrow.  They won't stop me.  I dine with them, sleep at
+the Wells; hotel for a night.  We are to be separated for a night.'
+
+She laid her hand in his and gave him a passing view of her face: 'For
+two, dear.  I am .  .  .  that man's visit--rather shaken: I shall have a
+better chance of sleeping if I know I am not disturbing you.'
+
+She was firm; and they kissed and parted.  Each had an unphrased
+speculation upon the power of Mrs. Burman to put division between them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+TREATS OF THE LADIES' LAPDOG TASSO FOR AN INSTANCE OF MOMENTOUS EFFECTS
+PRODUCED BY VERY MINOR CAUSES
+
+The maiden ladies Dorothea and Virginia Duvidney were thin--sweet old-
+fashioned grey gentlewomen, demurely conscious of their excellence and
+awake to the temptation in the consciousness, who imposed a certain
+reflex primness on the lips of the world when addressing them or when
+alluding to them.  For their appearance was picturesque of the ancestral
+time, and their ideas and scrupulousness of delivery suggested the
+belated in ripeness; orchard apples under a snow-storm; or any image that
+will ceremoniously convey the mind's profound appreciation together with
+the tooth's panic dread of tartness.  They were by no means tart; only,
+as you know, the tooth is apprehensively nervous; an uninviting sign will
+set it on edge.  Even the pen which would sketch them has a spell on it
+and must don its coat of office, walk the liveried footman behind them.
+
+Their wealth, their deeds of charity, their modesty, their built grey
+locks, their high repute; a 'Chippendale elegance' in a quaintly formal
+correctness, that they had, as Colney Durance called it; gave them some
+queenliness, and allowed them to claim the ear as an oracle and banish
+rebellious argument.  Intuitive knowledge, assisted by the Rev. Stuart
+Rem and the Rev. Abram Posterley, enabled them to pronounce upon men and
+things; not without effect; their country owned it; the foreigner beheld
+it.  Nor were they corrupted by the servility of the surrounding ear.
+They were good women, striving to be humbly good.  They might, for all
+the little errors they nightly unrolled to then perceptions, have stood
+before the world for a study in the white of our humanity.  And this may
+be but a washed wall, it is true: revolutionary sceptics are measuring
+the depths of it.  But the hue refreshes, the world admires; and we know
+it an object of aim to the bettermost of the wealthy.  If, happily,
+complacent circumstances have lifted us to the clean paved platform out
+of grip of puddled clay and bespattering wheeltracks, we get our chance
+of coming to it.
+
+Possessing, for example, nine thousand pounds per annum in Consols, and
+not expending the whole of it upon our luxuries, we are, without further
+privation, near to kindling the world's enthusiasm for whiteness.  Yet
+there, too, we find, that character has its problems to solve; there are
+shades in salt.  We must be charitable, but we should be just; we give to
+the poor of the land, but we are eminently the friends of our servants;
+duty to mankind diverts us not from the love we bear to our dog; and with
+a pathetic sorrow for silt, we discard it from sight and hearing.  We
+hate dirt.  Having said so much, having shown it, by sealing the mouth of
+Mr. Stuart Rem and iceing the veins of Mr. Abram Posterley, in relation
+to a dreadful public case and a melancholy private, we have a pleased
+sense of entry into the world's ideal.
+
+At the same time, we protest our unworthiness.  Acknowledgeing that they
+were not purely spotless, these ladies genuinely took the tiny fly-spot
+for a spur to purification; and they viewed it as a patch to raise in
+relief their goodness.  They gazed on it, saw themselves in it, and
+veiled it: warned of the cunning of an oft-defeated Tempter.
+
+To do good and sleep well, was their sowing and their reaping.  Uneasy
+consciences could not have slept.  The sleeping served for proof of an
+accurate reckoning and an expungeing of the day's debits.  They differed
+in opinion now and then, as we see companion waves of the river, blown by
+a gust, roll a shadow between them; and almost equally transient were
+their differences with a world that they condemned when they could not
+feel they (as an embodiment of their principles) were leading it.  The
+English world at times betrayed a restiveness in the walled pathway of
+virtue; for, alas, it closely neighbours the French; only a Channel,
+often dangerously smooth, to divide: but it is not perverted for long;
+and the English Funds are always constant and a tower.  Would they be
+suffered to be so, if libertinism were in the ascendant?
+
+Colney Durance was acquainted with the Duvidney ladies.  Hearing of the
+journey to them and the purport of it, he said, with the mask upon glee:
+'Then Victor has met his match!'  Nataly had sent for him to dine with
+her in Victor's absence: she was far from grieved, as to the result, by
+his assurance to her, that Victor had not a chance.  Colney thought so.
+'Just like him! to be off gaily to try and overcome or come over the
+greatest power in England.'  They were England herself; the squat old
+woman she has become by reason of her overlapping numbers of the
+comfortable fund-holder annuitants: a vast body of passives and
+negatives, living by precept, according to rules of precedent,
+and supposing themselves to be righteously guided because of their
+continuing undisturbed.  Them he branded, as hypocritical materialists,
+and the country for pride in her sweetmeat plethora of them:--mixed with
+an ancient Hebrew fear of offence to an inscrutable Lord, eccentrically
+appeasable through the dreary iteration of the litany of sinfulness.
+He was near a truth; and he had the heat of it on him.
+
+Satirists in their fervours might be near it to grasp it, if they could
+be moved to moral distinctness, mental intention, with a preference of
+strong plain speech over the crack of their whips.  Colney could not or
+would not praise our modern adventurous, experimental, heroic, tramping
+active, as opposed to yonder pursy passives and negatives; he had
+occasions for flicking the fellow sharply: and to speak of the Lord as
+our friend present with us, palpable to Reason, perceptible to natural
+piety solely through the reason, which justifies punishment; that would
+have stopped his mouth upon the theme of God-forsaken creatures.  Our
+satirist is an executioner by profession, a moralist in excuse, or at the
+tail of it; though he thinks the position reversed, when he moralizes
+angrily to have his angry use of the scourge condoned.  Nevertheless, he
+fills a serviceable place; and certainly he is not happy in his business.
+Colney suffered as heavily as he struck.  If he had been no more than a
+mime in the motley of satire, he would have sucked compensation from the
+acid of his phrases, for the failure to prick and goad, and work
+amendment.
+
+He dramatized to Nataly some of the scene going on at the Wells: Victor's
+petition; his fugue in urgency of it; the brief reply of Miss Dorothea
+and her muted echo Miss Virginia.  He was rather their apologist for
+refusing.  But, as when, after himself listening to their 'views,' he had
+deferentially withdrawn from the ladies of Moorsedge, and had then beheld
+their strangely-hatted lieutenants and the regiments of the toneless
+respectable on the pantiles and the mounts, the curse upon the satirist
+impelled him to generalize.  The quiet good ladies were multiplied: they
+were 'the thousands of their sisters, petticoated or long-coated or buck-
+skinned; comfortable annuitants under clerical shepherding, close upon
+outnumbering the labourers they paralyze at home and stultify abroad.'
+Colney thumped away.  The country's annuitants had for type 'the figure
+with the helmet of the Owl-Goddess and the trident of the Earth-shaker,
+seated on a wheel, at the back of penny-pieces; in whom you see neither
+the beauty of nakedness nor the charm of drapery; not the helmet's
+dignity or the trident's power; but she has patently that which stops the
+wheel; and poseing for representative of an imperial nation, she helps to
+pass a penny.'  So he passed his epigram, heedless of the understanding
+or attention of his hearer; who temporarily misjudged him for a man
+impelled by the vanity of literary point and finish, when indeed it was
+hot satiric spite, justified of its aim, which crushed a class to extract
+a drop of scathing acid, in the interests of the country, mankind as
+well.  Nataly wanted a picture painted, colours and details, that she
+might get a vision of the scene at Moorsedge.  She did her best to feel
+an omen and sound it, in his question 'whether the yearly increasing army
+of the orderly annuitants and their parasites does not demonstrate the
+proud old country as a sheath for pith rather than of the vital run of
+sap.'
+
+Perhaps it was patriotic to inquire; and doubtless she was the weakest of
+women; she could follow no thought; her heart was beating blindly beside
+Victor, hopeing for the refusal painful to her through his
+disappointment.
+
+'You think me foolish,' she made answer to one of Colney's shrugs; 'and
+it has come to that pitch with me, that I cannot be sensible of a merit
+except in being one with him--obeying, is the word.  And I have never yet
+known him fail.  That terrible Lakelands wears a different look to me,
+when I think of what he can do; though I would give half my days to
+escape it.'
+
+She harped on the chord of feverish extravagance; the more hateful to
+Colney because of his perceiving, that she simulated a blind devotedness
+to stupefy her natural pride; and he was divided between stamping on her
+for an imbecile and dashing at Victor for a maniac.  But her situation
+rendered her pitiable.  'You will learn tomorrow what Victor has done,'
+he said, and thought how the simple words carried the bitterness.
+
+That was uttered within a few minutes of midnight, when the ladies of
+Moorsedge themselves, after an exhausting resistance to their dearest
+relative, were at the hall-door of the house with Victor, saying the
+good-night, to which he responded hurriedly, cordially, dumbly, a baffled
+man.  They clasped hands.  Miss Dorothea said:
+
+'You, Victor, always.'  Miss Virginia said: 'You will be sure of
+welcome.'  He walked out upon the moonless night; and for lack of any
+rounded object in the smothering darkness to look at, he could nowhere
+take moorings to gather himself together and define the man who had
+undergone so portentous a defeat.  He was glad of quarters at an hotel,
+a solitary bed, absence from his Nataly.
+
+For their parts, the ladies were not less shattered.  They had no triumph
+in their victory: the weight of it bore them down.  They closed, locked,
+shot the bolts and fastened the chain of the door.  They had to be
+reminded by the shaking of their darling dog Tasso's curly silky coat,
+that he had not taken his evening's trot to notify malefactors of his
+watchfulness and official wrath at sound of footfall or a fancied one.
+Without consultation, they unbolted the door, and Tasso went forth, to
+'compose his vesper hymn,' as Mr. Posterley once remarked amusingly.
+
+Though not pretending to the Muse's crown so far, the little dog had
+qualities to entrance the spinster sex.  His mistresses talked of him;
+of his readiness to go forth; of the audible first line of his hymn or
+sonnet; of his instinct telling him that something was wrong in the
+establishment.  For most of the servants at Moorsedge were prostrated by
+a fashionable epidemic; a slight attack, the doctor said; but Montague,
+the butler, had withdrawn for the nursing of his wife; Perrin, the
+footman, was confined to his chamber; Manton, the favourite maid, had
+appeared in the morning with a face that caused her banishment to bed;
+and the cook, Mrs. Bannister, then sighingly agreed to send up cold meat
+for the ladies' dinner.  Hence their melancholy inhospitality to their
+cousin Victor, who had, in spite of his errors, the right to claim his
+place at their table, was 'of the blood,' they said.  He was recognized
+as the living prince of it.  His every gesture, every word, recalled the
+General.  The trying scene with him had withered them, they did not speak
+of it; each had to the other the look of a vessel that has come out of a
+gale.  Would they sleep?  They scarcely dared ask it of themselves.  They
+had done rightly; silence upon that reflection seemed best.  It was the
+silence of an inward agitation; still they knew the power of good
+consciences to summon sleep.
+
+Tasso was usually timed for five minutes.  They were astonished to
+discover by the clock, that they had given him ten.  He was very quiet:
+if so, and for whatever he did, he had his reason, they said: he was a
+dog endowed with reason: endowed--and how they wished that Mr. Stuart Rem
+would admit it!--with, their love of the little dog believed (and Mr.
+Posterley acquiesced), a soul.  Do but think it of dear animals, and any
+form of cruelty to them becomes an impossibility, Mr. Stuart Rem!  But he
+would not be convinced: ungenerously indeed he named Mr. Posterley a
+courtier.  The ladies could have retorted, that Mr. Posterley had not a
+brother who was the celebrated surgeon Sir Nicholas Rem.
+
+Usually Tasso came running in when the hall-door was opened to him.
+Not a sound of him could be heard.  The ladies blew his familiar whistle.
+He trotted back to a third appeal, and was, unfortunately for them, not
+caressed; he received reproaches from two forefingers directed straight
+at his reason.  He saw it and felt it.  The hug of him was deferred to
+the tender good-night to him in his basket at the foot of the ladies'
+beds.
+
+On entering their spacious bed-chamber, they were so fatigued that sleep
+appeared to their minds the compensating logical deduction.  Miss
+Dorothea suppressed a yawn, and inflicted it upon Miss Virginia, who
+returned it, with an apology, and immediately had her sister's hand on
+her shoulder, for, an attempted control of one of the irresistibles; a
+specacle imparting bitter shudders and shots to the sympathetic jawbones
+of an observer.  Hand at mouth, for not in privacy would they have been
+guilty of exposing a grimace, they signified, under an interim smile,
+their maidenly submission to the ridiculous force of nature: after which,
+Miss Virginia retired to the dressing-room, absorbed in woeful
+recollection of the resolute No they had been compelled to reiterate,
+in response to the most eloquent and, saving for a single instance,
+admirable man, their cousin, the representative of 'the blood,'
+supplicating them.  A recreant thankfulness coiled within her bosom at
+the thought, that Dorothea, true to her office of speaker, had tasked
+herself with the cruel utterance and repetition of the word.  Victor's
+wonderful eyes, his voice, yet more than his urgent pleas; and also, in
+the midst of his fiery flood of speech, his gentleness, his patience,
+pathos, and a man's tone through it all; were present to her.
+
+Disrobed, she knocked at the door.
+
+'I have called to you twice,' Dorothea said; and she looked a motive for
+the call.
+
+'What is it?' said Virginia, with faltering sweetness, with a terrible
+divination.
+
+The movement of a sigh was made.  'Are you aware of anything, dear?'
+
+Virginia was taken with the contrary movement of a sniff.  But the fear
+informing it prevented it from being venturesome.  Doubt of the pure
+atmosphere of their bed-chamber, appeared to her as too heretic even for
+the positive essay.  In affirming, that she was not aware of anything,
+her sight fell on Tasso.  His eyeballs were those of a little dog that
+has been awfully questioned.
+
+'It is more than a suspicion,' said Dorothea; and plainly now, while open
+to the seductions of any pleasing infidel testimony, her nose in
+repugnance convicted him absolutely.
+
+Virginia's nose was lowered a few inches; it inhaled and stopped midway.
+'You must be mistaken, dear.  He never .  .  .  '
+
+'But are you insensible to the .  .  .'  Dorothea's eyelids fainted.
+
+Virginia dismissed the forlornest of efforts at incredulity.  A whiff
+of Tasso had smitten her.  'Ah!' she exclaimed and fell away.  'Is it
+Tasso!  How was it you noticed nothing before undressing, dear?'
+
+'Thinking of what we have gone through to-night!  I forgot him.  At last
+the very strange .  .  .  The like of it I have not ever!  .  .  .  And
+upon that thick coat!  And, dear, it is late.  We are in the morning
+hours.'
+
+'But, my dear-Oh, dear, what is to be done with him?'
+
+That was the crucial point for discussion.  They had no servant to give
+them aid; Manton, they could not dream of disturbing.  And Tasso's
+character wag in the estimate; he hated washing; it balefully depraved
+his temper; and not only, creature of habit that he was, would he decline
+to lie down anywhere save in their bedroom, he would lament, plead,
+insist unremittingly, if excluded; terrifying every poor invalid of the
+house.  Then again, were they at this late hour to dress themselves, and
+take him downstairs, and light a fire in the kitchen, and boil sufficient
+water to give him a bath and scrubbing?  Cold water would be death to
+him.  Besides, he would ring out his alarum for the house to hear, pour
+out all his poetry, poor dear, as Mr. Posterley called it, at a touch of
+cold water.  The catastrophe was one to weep over, the dilemma a trial of
+the strongest intelligences.
+
+In addition to reviews of their solitary alternative-the having of a
+befouled degraded little dog in their chamber through the night, they
+were subjected to a conflict of emotions when eyeing him: and there came
+to them the painful, perhaps irreverent, perhaps uncharitable, thought:--
+that the sinner who has rolled in the abominable, must cleanse him and do
+things to polish him and perfume before again embraced even by the mind:
+if indeed we can ever have our old sentiment for him again!  Mr. Stuart
+Rem might decide it for them.  Nay, before even the heart embraces him,
+he must completely purify himself.  That is to say, the ordinary human
+sinner--save when a relative.  Contemplating Tasso, the hearts of the
+ladies gushed out in pity of an innocent little dog, knowing not evil,
+dependent on his friends for help to be purified;--necessarily kept at a
+distance: the very look of him prescribed extreme separation, as far as
+practicable.  But they had proof of a love almost greater than it was
+previous to the offence, in the tender precautions they took to elude
+repulsion.
+
+He was rolling on the rug, communicating contagion.  Flasks of treble-
+distilled lavender water, and their favourite, traditional in the family,
+eau d'Arquebusade, were on the toilet-table.  They sprinkled his basket,
+liberally sprinkled the rug and the little dog.  Perfume-pastilles were
+in one of the sitting-rooms below; and Virginia would have gone down
+softly to fetch a box, but Dorothea restrained her, in pity for the
+servants, with the remark: 'It would give us a nightmare of a Roman
+Catholic Cathedral!'  A bit of the window was lifted by Dorothea,
+cautiously, that prowling outsiders might not be attracted.  Tasso was
+wooed to his basket.  He seemed inquisitive; the antidote of his
+naughtiness excited him; his tail circled after his muzzle several times;
+then he lay.  A silken scarf steeped in eau d'Arquebusade was flung
+across him.
+
+Their customary devout observances concluded, lights were extinguished,
+and the ladies kissed, and entered their beds.
+
+Their beds were not homely to them.  Dorothea thought that Virginia was
+long in settling herself.  Virginia did not like the sound of Dorothea's
+double sigh.  Both listened anxiously for the doings of Tasso.  He
+rested.
+
+He was uneasy; he was rounding his basket once more; unaware of the
+exaggeration of his iniquitous conduct, poor innocent, he shook that
+dreadful coat of his!  He had displaced the prophylactic cover of the
+scarf.
+
+He drove them in a despair to speculate on the contention between the
+perfume and the stench in junction, with such a doubt of the victory of
+which of the two, as drags us to fear our worst.  It steals into our
+nostrils, possesses them.  As the History of Mankind has informed us,
+we were led up to our civilization by the nose.  But Philosophy warns us
+on that eminence; to beware of trusting exclusively to our conductor,
+lest the mind of us at least be plunged back into barbarism.  The ladies
+hated both the cause and the consequence, they had a revulsion from the
+object, of the above contention.  But call it not a contention: there is
+nobility in that.  This was a compromise, a degrading union, with very
+sickening results.  Whether they came of an excess of the sprinkling,
+could not well be guessed.  The drenching at least was righteously
+intended.
+
+Beneath their shut eyelids, they felt more and more the oppression of a
+darkness not laden with slumber.  They saw it insolidity; themselves as
+restless billows, driven dashing to the despondent sigh.  Sleep was
+denied them.
+
+Tasso slept.  He had sinned unknowingly, and that is not a spiritual sin;
+the chastisement confers the pardon.
+
+But why was this ineffable blessing denied to them?  Was it that they
+might have a survey of all the day's deeds and examine them under the
+cruel black beams of Insomnia?
+
+Virginia said: 'You are wakeful.'
+
+'Thoughtful,' was the answer.
+
+A century of the midnight rolled on.
+
+Dorothea said: 'He behaved very beautifully.'
+
+'I looked at the General's portrait while he besought us,' Virginia
+replied.
+
+'One sees him in Victor, at Victor's age.  Try to sleep.'
+
+'I do.  I pray that you may.'
+
+Silence courted slumber.  Their interchange of speech from the posture
+of bodies on their backs, had been low and deliberate, in the tone of
+the vaults.  Dead silence recalled the strangeness of it.  The night was
+breathless; their open window a peril bestowing no boon.  They were
+mutually haunted by sound of the gloomy query at the nostrils of each
+when drawing the vital breath.  But for that, they thought they might
+have slept.
+
+Bed spake to bed:
+
+'The words of Mr. Stuart Rem last Sunday!'  'He said: "Be just."  Could
+one but see direction!'
+
+'In obscurity, feeling is a guide.'
+
+'The heart.'
+
+'It may sometimes be followed.'
+
+'When it concerns the family.'
+
+'He would have the living, who are seeking peace, be just.'
+
+'Not to assume the seat of justice.'
+
+Again they lay as tombstone effigies, that have committed the passage of
+affairs to another procession of the Ages.
+
+There was a gentle sniff, in hopeless confirmation of the experience of
+its predecessors.  A sister to it ensued.
+
+'Could Victor have spoken so, without assurance in his conscience, that
+his entreaty was righteously addressed to us?  that we .  .  .'
+
+'And no others!'
+
+'I think of his language.  He loves the child.'
+
+'In heart as in mind, he is eminently gifted; acknowledgeing error.'
+
+'He was very young.'
+
+The huge funereal minutes conducted their sonorous hearse, the hour.
+
+It struck in the bed-room: Three.
+
+No more than three of the clock, it was the voice telling of half the
+precious restorative night-hours wasted.
+
+Now, as we close our eyelids when we would go to sleep, so must we,
+in expectation of the peace of mind granting us the sweet oblivion,
+preliminarily do something which invokes, that we may obtain it.
+
+'Dear,' Dorothea said.
+
+'I know indeed,' said Virginia.
+
+'We may have been!'
+
+'Not designingly.'
+
+'Indeed not.  But harsh it may be named, if the one innocent is to be the
+sufferer.'
+
+'The child can in no sense be adjudged guilty.'
+
+'It is Victor's child.'
+
+'He adores the child.'
+
+Wheels were in mute motion within them; and presently the remark was
+tossed-up:
+
+'In his coming to us, it is possible to see paternal solicitude'
+
+Thence came fruit of reflection:
+
+'To be instrumental as guides to a tender young life!'
+
+Reflection heated with visions:
+
+'Once our dream!'
+
+They had the happier feeling of composure, though Tasso possessed
+the room.  Not Tasso, but a sublimated offensiveness, issue of the
+antagonistically combined, dispersed to be the more penetrating;
+insomuch that it seemed to them they could not ever again make use of eau
+d'Arquebusade without the vitiating reminder.  So true were the words of
+Mr. Stuart Rem: 'Half measures to purification are the most delusive of
+our artifices.'  Fatigue and its reflections helped to be peacefuller.
+Their souls were mounting to a serenity above the nauseating degradation,
+to which the poor little dog had dragged them.
+
+'Victor gave his promise.'
+
+'At least, concession would not imply contact with the guilty.'
+
+Both sighed as they took up the burden of the vaporous Tasso to drop him;
+with the greater satisfaction in the expelling of their breath.
+
+'It might be said, dear, that concession to his entreaty does not in any
+way countenance the sin.'
+
+'I can see, dear, how it might be read as a reproof.'
+
+Their exchange of sentences followed meditative pauses; Dorothea leading.
+
+'To one so sensitive as Victor!'
+
+'A month or two of our society for the child!'
+
+'It is not the length of time.'
+
+'The limitation assures against maternal claims.'
+
+'She would not dare.'
+
+'He used the words: "her serious respect" for us.  I should not wish to
+listen to him often.'
+
+'We listen to a higher.'
+
+'It may really be, that the child is like him.'
+
+'Not resembling Mr. Stuart Rem's Clementina!'
+
+'A week of that child gave us our totally sleepless night.'  'One thinks
+more hopefully of a child of Victor's.'
+
+'He would preponderate.'
+
+'He would.'
+
+They sighed; but it was now with the relief of a lightened oppression.
+
+'If, dear, in truth the father's look is in the child, he has the greater
+reason to desire for her a taste of our atmosphere.'
+
+'Do not pursue it.  Sleep.'
+
+'One prayer!'
+
+'Your mention of our atmosphere, dear, destroys my power to frame one.
+Do you, for two.  But I would cleanse my heart.'
+
+'There is none purer.'
+
+'Hush.'
+
+Virginia spoke a more fervent word of praise of her sister, and had not
+the hushing response to it.  She heard the soft regular breathing.  Her
+own was in downy fellowship with it a moment later.
+
+At the hour of nine, in genial daylight, sitting over the crumbs of his
+hotel breakfast, Victor received a little note that bore the handwriting
+of Dorothea Duvidney.
+
+     'Dear Victor, we are prepared to receive the child for a month.
+     In haste, before your train.  Our love.  D. and V.'
+
+His face flashed out of cloud.
+
+A more precious document had never been handed to him.  It chased back to
+midnight the doubt hovering over his belief in himself;--phrased to say,
+that he was no longer the Victor Radnor known to the world.  And it
+extinguished a corpse-like recollection of a baleful dream in the night.
+Here shone radiant witness of his being the very man; save for the spot
+of his recent confusion in distinguishing his identity or in feeling that
+he stood whole and solid.--Because of two mature maiden ladies?  Yes,
+because of two maiden ladies, my good fellow.  And friend Colney, you
+know the ladies, and what the getting round them for one's purposes
+really means.
+
+The sprite of Colney Durance had struck him smartly overnight.  Victor's
+internal crow was over Colney now.  And when you have the optimist and
+pessimist acutely opposed in a mixing group, they direct lively
+conversations at one another across the gulf of distance, even of time.
+For a principle is involved, besides the knowledge of the other's triumph
+or dismay.  The couple are scales of a balance; and not before last night
+had Victor ever consented to think of Colney ascending while he dropped
+low to graze the pebbles.
+
+He left his hotel for the station, singing the great aria of the fourth
+Act of the Favorita: neglected since that mighty German with his Rienzi,
+and Tannhauser, and Tristan and Isolda, had mastered him, to the
+displacement of his boyhood's beloved sugary -inis and -antes and
+-zettis; had clearly mastered, not beguiled, him; had wafted him up to a
+new realm, invigorating if severer.  But now his youth would have its
+voice.  He travelled up to town with Sir Abraham Quatley and talked, and
+took and gave hints upon City and Commercial affairs, while the honeyed
+Italian of the conventional, gloriously animal, stress and flutter had a
+revel in his veins, now and then mutedly ebullient at the mouth: honeyed,
+golden, rich in visions;--having surely much more of Nature's
+encouragement to her children?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+NESTA'S ENGAGEMENT
+
+A word in his ear from Fenellan, touching that man Blathenoy,
+set the wheels of Victor's brain at work upon his defences, for a minute,
+on the walk Westward.  Who knew?--who did not know!  He had a torpid
+consciousness that he cringed to the world, with an entreaty to the great
+monster to hold off in ignorance; and the next instant, he had caught its
+miserable spies by the lurcher neck and was towering.  He dwelt on his
+contempt of them, to curtain the power they could stir.
+
+'The little woman, you say, took to Dartrey?'
+
+Fenellan, with the usual apologetic moderation of a second statement,
+thought 'there was the look of it.'
+
+'Well, we must watch over her.  Dartrey!--but Dartrey's an honest fellow
+with women.  But men are men.  Very few men spare a woman when the mad
+fit is on her.  A little woman-pretty little woman!--wife to Jacob
+Blathenoy!  She mustn't at her age have any close choosing--under her
+hand.  And Dartrey's just the figure to strike a spark in a tinder-box
+head.'
+
+'With a husband who'd reduce Minerva's to tinder, after a month of him!'
+
+'He spent his honeymoon at his place at Wrensham; told me so.'  Blathenoy
+had therefore then heard of the building of Lakelands by the Victor
+Radnor of the City; and had then, we guess--in the usual honeymoon
+boasting of a windbag with his bride--wheezed the foul gossip, to hide
+his emptiness and do duty for amusement of the pretty little caged bird.
+Probably so.  But Victor knew that Blathenoy needed him and feared him.
+Probably the wife had been enjoined to keep silence; for the
+Blachingtons, Fannings and others were, it could be sworn, blank and
+unscratched folio sheets on the subject:--as yet; unless Mrs. Burman had
+dropped venom.
+
+'One pities the little woman, eh, Fenellan?'
+
+'Dartrey won't be back for a week or so; and they're off to Switzerland,
+after the dinner they give.  I heard from him this morning; one of the
+Clanconans is ill.
+
+'Lucky.  But wherever Blathenoy takes her, he must be the same "arid
+bore," as old Colney says.'
+
+'A domestic simoom,' said Fenellan, booming it: and Victor had a shudder.
+
+'Awful thing, marriage, to some women!  We chain them to that domestic
+round; most of them haven't the means of independence or a chance of
+winning it; and all that's open to them, if they've made a bad cast for a
+mate--and good Lord!  how are they to know before it's too late!--they
+haven't a choice except to play tricks or jump to the deuce or sit and
+"drape in blight," as Colney has it; though his notion of the optional
+marriages, broken or renewed every seven years!--if he means it.  You
+never know, with him.  It sounds like another squirt of savage irony.
+It's donkey nonsense, eh?'
+
+'The very hee-haw of nonsense,' Fenellan acquiesced.
+
+'Come, come; read your Scriptures; donkeys have shown wisdom,' Victor
+said, rather leaning to the theme of a fretfulness of women in the legal
+yoke.  'They're donkeys till we know them for prophets.  Who can tell!
+Colney may be hailed for one fifty years hence.'
+
+Fenellan was not invited to enter the house, although the loneliness of
+his lodgeings was known, and also, that he played whist at his Club.
+Victor had grounds for turning to him at the door and squeezing his hand
+warmly, by way of dismissal.  In ascribing them to a weariness at
+Fenellan's perpetual acquiescence, he put the cover on them, and he
+stamped it with a repudiation of the charge, that Colney's views upon the
+great Marriage Question were the 'very hee-haw of nonsense.'  They were
+not the hee-haw; in fact, viewing the host of marriages, they were for
+discussion; there was no bray about them.  He could not feel them to be
+absurd while Mrs. Burman's tenure of existence barred the ceremony.
+Anything for a phrase! he murmured of Fenellan's talk; calling him, Dear
+old boy, to soften the slight.
+
+Nataly had not seen Fenellan or heard from Dartrey; so she continued to
+be uninformed of her hero's release; and that was in the order of happy
+accidents.  She had hardly to look her interrogation for the news; it
+radiated.  But he stated such matter-of-course briefly.  'The good ladies
+are ready to receive our girl.'
+
+Her chagrin resolved to a kind of solace of her draggled pride, in the
+idea, that he who tamed everybody to submission, might well have command
+of her.
+
+The note, signed D.  and V., was shown.
+
+There stood the words.  And last night she had been partly of the opinion
+of Colney Durance.  She sank down among the unreasoning abject;--not this
+time with her perfect love of him, but with a resistance and a dubiety
+under compression.  For she had not quite comprehended why Nesta should
+go.  This readiness of the Duvidney ladies to receive the girl, stopped
+her mental inquiries.
+
+She begged for a week's delay; 'before the parting'; as her dear old
+silly mother's pathos whimpered it, of the separation for a month! and he
+smiled and hummed pleasantly at any small petition, thinking her in error
+to expect Dartrey's return to town before the close of a week; and then
+wondering at women, mildly denouncing in his heart the mothers who ran
+risk of disturbing their daughters' bosoms with regard to particular
+heroes married or not.  Dartrey attracted women: he was one of the men
+who do it without effort.  Victor's provident mind blamed the mother for
+the indiscreetness of her wish to have him among them.  But Dudley had
+been making way bravely of late; he improved; he began to bloom, like a
+Spring flower of the garden protected from frosts under glass; and Fredi
+was the sheltering and nourishing bestower of the lessons.  One could
+see, his questions and other little points revealed, that he had a
+certain lover's dread of Dartrey Fenellan; a sort of jealousy: Victor
+understood the feeling.  To love a girl, who has her ideal of a man
+elsewhere in another; though she may know she never can wed the man, and
+has not the hope of it; is torment to the lover quailing, as we do in
+this terrible season of the priceless deliciousness, stripped against all
+the winds that blow; skinless at times.  One gets up a sympathy for the
+poor shy dependent shivering lover.  Nevertheless, here was young Dudley
+waking, visibly becoming bolder.  As in the flute-duets, he gained fire
+from concert.  The distance between Cronidge and Moorsedge was two miles
+and a quarter.
+
+Instead of the delay of a whole week, Victor granted four days, which
+embraced a musical evening at Mrs. John Cormyn's on the last of the days,
+when Nesta was engaged to sing with her mother a duet of her own
+composition, the first public fruit of her lessons in counterpoint from
+rigid Herr Strauscher, who had said what he had said, in letting it pass:
+eulogy, coming from him.  So Victor heard, and he doated am the surprise
+to come for him, in a boyish anticipation.  The girl's little French
+ballads under tutelage of Louise de Seilles promised, though they were
+imitative.  If Strauscher let this pass .  .  .  Victor saw Grand Opera
+somewhere to follow; England's claim to be a creative musical nation
+vindicated; and the genius of the fair sex as well.
+
+He heard the duet at Mrs. Cormyn's; and he imagined a hearing of his
+Fredi's Opera, and her godmother's delight in it; the once famed
+Sanfredini's consent to be the diva at a rehearsal, and then her
+compelling her hidalgo duque to consent further: an event not
+inconceivable.  For here was downright genius; the flowering aloe of the
+many years in formation; and Colney admitted the song to have a streak of
+genius; though he would pettishly and stupidly say, that our modern
+newspaper Press is able now to force genius for us twenty or so to the
+month, excluding Sundays-our short pauses for the incubation of it.  Real
+rare genius was in that song, nothing forced; and exquisite melody; one
+of those melodies which fling gold chains about us and lead us off, lead
+us back into Eden.  Victor hummed at bars of it on the drive homeward.
+His darlings had to sing it again in the half-lighted drawing-room.  The
+bubble-happiness of the three was vexed only by tidings heard from Colney
+during the evening of a renewed instance of Skepsey's misconduct.
+Priscilla Graves had hurried away to him at the close of Mr. John
+Cormyn's Concert, in consequence; in grief and in sympathy.  Skepsey was
+to appear before the magistrate next morning, for having administered
+physical chastisement to his wife during one of her fits of drunkenness.
+Colney had seen him.  His version of the story was given, however, in the
+objectionable humorous manner: none could gather from it of what might be
+pleaded for Skepsey.  His 'lesson to his wife in the art of pugilism,
+before granting her Captain's rank among the Defensive Amazons of Old
+England,' was the customary patent absurdity.  But it was odd, that
+Skepsey always preferred his appeal for help to Colney Durance.  Nesta
+proposed following Priscilla that night.  She had hinted her wish, on the
+way home; she was urgent, beseeching, when her father lifted praises of
+her: she had to start with her father by the train at seven in the
+morning, and she could not hear of poor Skepsey for a number of hours.
+She begged a day's delay; which would enable her, she said, to join them
+in dining at the Blachingtons', and seeing dear Lakelands again.  'I was
+invited, you know.'  She spoke in childish style, and under her eyes she
+beheld her father and mother exchange looks.  He had a fear that Nataly
+might support the girl's petition.  Nataly read him to mean, possible
+dangers among the people at Wrensham.  She had seemed hesitating.  After
+meeting Victor's look, her refusal was firm.  She tried to make it one of
+distress for the use of the hard word to her own dear girl.  Nesta spied
+beneath.
+
+But what was it?  There was a reason for her going!  She had a right to
+stay, and see and talk with Captain Dartrey, and she was to be deported!
+
+So now she set herself to remember little incidents at Creckholt:
+particularly a conversation in a very young girl's hearing, upon Sir
+Humphrey and Lady Pottil's behaviour to the speakers, her parents.
+She had then, and she now had, an extraordinary feeling, as from a wind
+striking upon soft summer weather off regions of ice, that she was in her
+parents' way.  How?  The feeling was irrational; it could give her no
+reply, or only the multitudinous which are the question violently
+repeated.  She slept on it.
+
+She and her father breakfasted by the London birds' first twitter.  They
+talked of Skepsey.  She spoke of her going as exile.  'No,' said he,
+'you're sure to meet friends.'
+
+Her cheeks glowed.  It came wholly through the suddenness of the
+recollection, that the family-seat of one among the friends was near the
+Wells.
+
+He was allowed to fancy, as it suited him to fancy, that a vivid secret
+pleasure laid the colour on those ingenuous fair cheeks.
+
+'A solitary flute for me, for a month!  I shall miss my sober comrade:
+got the habit of duetting: and he's gentle, bears with me.'
+
+Tears lined her eyelids.  'Who would not be, dearest dada!  But there is
+nothing to bear except the honour.'
+
+'You like him?  You and I always have the same tastes, Fredi.'
+
+Now there was a reddening of the sun at the mount; all the sky aflame.
+How could he know that it was not the heart in the face!  She reddened
+because she had perused his wishes; had detected a scheme striking off
+from them, and knew a man to be the object of it; and because she had at
+the same time the sense of a flattery in her quick divination; and she
+was responsively emotional, her blood virginal; often it was a tropical
+lightning.
+
+It looked like the heart doing rich painter's work on maiden features.
+Victor was naturally as deceived as he wished to be.
+
+From his being naturally so, his remarks on Dudley had an air of
+embracing him as one of the family.  'His manner to me just hits me.'
+
+'I like to see him with you,' she said.
+
+Her father let his tongue run: 'One of the few young men I feel perfectly
+at home with!  I do like dealing with a gentleman.  I can confide in a
+gentleman: honour, heart, whatever I hold dearest.'
+
+There he stopped, not too soon.  The girl was mute, fully agreeing,
+slightly hardening.  She had a painful sense of separation from her dear
+Louise.  And it was now to be from her mother as well: she felt the pain
+when kissing her mother in bed.  But this was moderated by the prospect
+of a holiday away out of reach of Mr. Barmby's pursuing voice, whom her
+mother favoured: and her mother was concealing something from her; so she
+could not make the confidante of her mother.  Nataly had no forewarnings.
+Her simple regrets filled her bosom.  All night she had been taking her
+chastisement, and in the morning it seemed good to her, that she should
+be denuded, for her girl to learn the felicity of having relatives.
+
+For some reason, over which Nataly mused in the succeeding hours, the
+girl had not spoken of any visit her mother was to pay to the Duvidney
+ladies or they to her.  Latterly she had not alluded to her mother's
+family.  It might mean, that the beloved and dreaded was laying finger on
+a dark thing in the dark; reading syllables by touch; keeping silence
+over the communications to a mind not yet actively speculative, as it is
+a way with young women.  'With young women educated for the market, to be
+timorous, consequently secretive, rather snaky,' Colney Durance had said.
+Her Nesta was not one of the 'framed and glazed' description, cited by
+him, for an example of the triumph of the product; 'exactly harmonious
+with the ninny male's ideal of female innocence.'  No; but what if the
+mother had opened her heart to her girl?  It had been of late her wish or
+a dream, shaping hourly to a design, now positively to go through that
+furnace.  Her knowledge of Victor's objection, restrained an impulse that
+had not won spring enough to act against his counsel or vivify an
+intelligence grown dull in slavery under him, with regard to the one
+seeming right course.  The adoption of it would have wounded him--
+therefore her.  She had thought of him first; she had also thought of
+herself, and she blamed herself now.  She went so far as to think, that
+Victor was guilty of the schemer's error of counting human creatures
+arithmetically, in the sum, without the estimate of distinctive qualities
+and value here and there.  His return to a shivering sensitiveness on the
+subject of his girl's enlightenment 'just yet,' for which Nataly pitied
+and loved him, sharing it, with humiliation for doing so, became finally
+her excuse.  We must have some excuse, if we would keep to life.
+
+Skepsey's case appeared in the evening papers.  He confessed, 'frankly,'
+he said, to the magistrate, that, 'acting under temporary exasperation,
+he had lost for a moment a man's proper self-command.'  He was as frank
+in stating, that he 'occupied the prisoner's place before his Worship a
+second time, and was a second time indebted to the gentleman, Mr. Colney
+Durance, who so kindly stood by him.'  There was hilarity in the Court at
+his quaint sententious envelopment of the idiom of the streets, which he
+delivered with solemnity: 'He could only plead, not in absolute
+justification--an appeal to human sentiments--the feelings of a man of
+the humbler orders, returning home in the evening, and his thoughts upon
+things not without their importance, to find repeatedly the guardian of
+his household beastly drunk, and destructive.'  Colney made the case
+quite intelligible to the magistrate; who gravely robed a strain of the
+idiomatic in the officially awful, to keep in tune with his delinquent.
+No serious harm had been done to the woman.  Skepsey was admonished and
+released.  His wife expressed her willingness to forgive him, now he had
+got his lesson; and she hoped he would understand, that there was no need
+for a woman to learn pugilism.  Skepsey would have explained; but the
+case was over, he was hustled out.
+
+However, a keen young reporter present smelt fun for copy; he followed
+the couple; and in a particular evening Journal, laughable matter was
+printed concerning Skepsey's view of the pugilism to be imparted to women
+for their physical-protection in extremity, and the distinction of it
+from the blow conveying the moral lesson to them; his wife having
+objected to the former, because it annoyed her and he pestered her;
+and she was never, she said, ready to stand up to him for practice,
+as he called it, except when she had taken more than he thought wholesome
+for her: he had no sense.  There was a squabble between them, because he
+chose to scour away to his master's office instead of conducting her home
+with the honours.  Nesta read the young reporter's version, with shrieks.
+She led the ladies of Moorsedge to discover amusement in it.
+
+At first, as her letter to her mother described them, they were like a
+pair of pieces of costly China, with the settled smile, and cold.  She
+saw but the outside of them, and she continued reporting the variations,
+which steadily determined the warmth.  On the night of the third day,
+they kissed her tenderly; they were human figures.
+
+No one could be aware of the trial undergone by the good ladies in
+receiving her: Victor's child; but, as their phrase would have run, had
+they dared to give it utterance to one another, a child of sin.  How
+foreign to them, in that character, how strange, when she was looked on
+as an inhabitant of their house, they hardly dared to estimate; until the
+timorous estimation, from gradually swelling, suddenly sank; nature
+invaded them; they could discard the alienating sense of the taint; and
+not only did they no longer fear the moment when Mr. Stuart Rem or Mr.
+Posterley might call for evening tea, but they consulted upon inviting
+the married one of those gentlemen, to 'divert dear Nesta.'  Every night
+she slept well.  In all she did, she proved she was 'of the blood.'
+She had Victor's animated eyes; she might have, they dreaded to think,
+his eloquence.  They put it down to his eloquence entirely, that their
+resistance to his petition had been overcome, for similarly with the
+treatment of the private acts of royal personages by lacquey History,
+there is, in the minds of the ultra-civilized, an insistance, that any
+event having a consequence in matters personal to them, be at all hazards
+recorded with the utmost nicety in decency.  By such means, they preserve
+the ceremonial self-respect, which is a necessity of their existence; and
+so they maintain the regal elevation over the awe-struck subjects of
+their interiors; who might otherwise revolt, pull down, scatter,
+dishonour, expose for a shallow fiction the holiest, the most vital to
+them.  A democratic evil spirit is abroad, generated among congregations,
+often perilously communicating its wanton laughter to the desperate
+wickedness they know (not solely through the monition of Mr. Stuart Rem)
+to lurk within.  It has to be excluded: on certain points they must not
+think.  The night of Tasso was darkly clouded in the minds of the pure
+ladies: a rift would have seized their half-slumbering sense of smell,
+to revive the night, perhaps disorder the stately march of their
+intelligences.
+
+Victor's eloquence, Victor's influence, Victor's child he carried them as
+a floodstream, insomuch, that their reception of this young creature of
+the blot on her birth, was regarded by them in the unmentioned abstract,
+and the child's presence upon earth seen with the indulgence (without the
+naughty curiosity) of the loyal moral English for the numerous offspring
+of the peccadillos of their monarchs.  These things pass muster from
+being 'Britannically cocooned in the purple,' says our irreverent
+satirist; and the maiden ladies' passion of devotion to 'the blood'
+helped to blind them; but still more so did the imperious urgency to
+curtain closely the night of Tasso, throwing all its consequences upon
+Victor's masterful tongue.  Whence it ensued (and here is the danger for
+illogical individuals as well as vast communities, who continue to batten
+upon fiction when the convenience of it has taken the place of pleasure),
+that they had need to exalt his eloquence, for a cloak to their conduct;
+and doing it, they fell into a habit of yielding to him; they
+disintegrated under him; rules, principles, morality, were shaken to some
+confusion.  And still proceeding thus, they now and then glanced back,
+more wonderingly than convicted sinners upon their days of early
+innocence, at the night when successfully they withstood him.  They who
+had doubted of the rightness of letting Victor's girl come into collision
+with two clerical gentlemen, one of whom was married, permitted him now
+to bring the Hon. Dudley Sowerby to their house, and make appointments
+to meet Mr. Dudley Sowerby under a roof that sheltered a young lady,
+evidently the allurement to the scion of aristocracy; of whose family Mr.
+Stuart Rem had spoken in the very kindling hushed tones, proper to the
+union of a sacerdotal and an English citizen's veneration.
+
+How would it end?  And if some day this excellent Mr. Dudley Sowerby
+reproached them!  He could not have a sweeter bride, one more truly a
+lady in education and manners; but the birth! the child's name!  Their
+trouble was emitted in a vapour of interjections.  Very perplexing was it
+for the good ladies of strict principles to reflect, as dimly they did,
+that the concrete presence of dear Nesta silenced and overcame objections
+to her being upon earth.  She seemed, as it were, a draught of
+redoubtable Nature inebriating morality.  But would others be similarly
+affected?  Victor might get his release, to do justice to the mother: it
+would not cover the child.  Prize as they might the quality of the Radnor
+blood (drawn from the most ancient of original Britain's princes), there
+was also the Cantor blood for consideration; and it was old, noble,
+proud.  Would it be satisfied in matching itself with great wealth,
+a radiant health, and the good looks of a young flower?  For the sake
+of the dear girl, the ladies hoped that it would; and they enlarged the
+outline of their wedding present, while, in their minds, the noble
+English family which could be satisfied so, was lowered, partaking
+of the taint they had personally ceased to recognize.
+
+Of one thing they were sure, and it enlisted them: the gentleman loved
+the girl.  Her love of him, had it been prominent to view, would have
+stirred a feminine sigh; not more, except a feminine lecture to follow.
+She was quite uninflamed, fresh and cool as a spring.  His ardour had no
+disguise.  They measured him by the favourite fiction's heroes of their
+youth, and found him to gaze, talk, comport himself, according to the
+prescription; correct grammar, finished sentences, all that is expected
+of a gentleman enamoured; and ever with the watchful intentness for his
+lady's faintest first dawn of an inclining to a wish.  Mr. Dudley
+Sowerby's eye upon Nesta was really an apprentice.  There is in Love's
+young season a magnanimity in the male kind.  Their superior strength
+and knowledge are made subservient to the distaff of the weaker and
+shallower: they crown her queen; her look is their mandate.  So was it
+when Sir Charles and Sir Rupert and the estimable Villiers Davenant
+touched maidenly hearts to throb: so is it now, with the Hon. Dudley
+Sowerby.
+
+Very haltingly, the ladies were guilty of a suggestion to Victor.
+'Oh! Fredi?' said he; 'admires her, no doubt; and so do I, so we all do;
+she's one of the nice girls; but as to Cupid's darts, she belongs to the
+cucumber family, and he shoots without fireing.  We shall do the mischief
+if we put an interdict.  Don't you remember the green days when obstacles
+were the friction to light that match?'  Their pretty nod of assent
+displayed the virgin pride of the remembrance: they dreamed of having
+once been exceedingly wilful; it refreshed their nipped natures; and
+dwelling on it, they forgot to press their suggestion.  Incidentally,
+he named the sum his Fredi would convey to her husband; with, as was
+calculable, the further amount his only child would inherit.  A curious
+effect was produced on them.  Though they were not imaginatively
+mercenary, as the creatures tainted with wealth commonly are, they talked
+of the sum over and over in the solitude of their chamber.  'Dukes have
+married for less.'  Such an heiress, they said, might buy up a
+Principality.  Victor had supplied them with something of an apology
+to the gentleman proposing to Nesta in their house.
+
+The chronicle of it is, that Dudley Sowerby did this on the fifteenth day
+of September; and that it was not known to the damsel's parents before
+the twenty-third; as they were away on an excursion in South Tyrol:--
+away, flown, with just a word of the hurried departure to their envious,
+exiled girl; though they did not tell her of new constructions at the
+London house partly causing them to fly.  Subject to their consent, she
+wrote, she had given hers.  The letter was telegramic on the essential
+point.  She wrote of Mr. Barmby's having visited Mr. Posterley at the
+Wells, and she put it just as flatly.  Her principal concern, to judge by
+her writing, was, to know what Mr. Durance had done, during her absence,
+with the group of emissary-advocates of the various tongues of Europe on
+board the steam-Liner conducting them the first stage of their journey to
+the Court of Japan.
+
+Mr. Simeon Fenellan had written his opinion, that all these delegates of
+the different European nationalities were nothing other than dupes of a
+New-York Syndicate of American Humorists, not without an eye on the
+mainchance; and he was sure they would be set to debate publicly, before
+an audience of high-priced tickets, in the principal North American
+Cities, previous to the embarcation for Japan at San Francisco.  Mr.
+Fenellan eulogized the immense astuteness of Dr. Gannius in taking his
+daughter Delphica with him.  Dr. Gannius had singled forth poor Dr.
+Bouthoin for the object of his attacks; but Nesta was chiefly anxious to
+hear of Delphica's proceedings; she was immensely interested in Delphica,
+and envied her; and the girl's funny speculations over the play of
+Delphica's divers arts upon the Greek, and upon the Russian, and upon the
+English curate Mr. Semhians, and upon M. Falarique--set Gallically
+pluming and crowing out of an Alsace-Lorraine growl--were clever.  Only,
+in such a letter, they were amazing.
+
+Nataly received it at Campiglio, when about to start for an excursion
+down the Sarca Valley to Arco.  Her letter of reply was delayed.  One to
+Victor from Dudley Sowerby, awaited them, on their return.  'Confirms
+Fredi,' he said, showing it, and praising it as commendable, properly
+fervid.  She made pretence to read, she saw the words.
+
+Her short beat of wings was over.  She had joined herself with Victor's
+leap for a change, thirsting for the scenery of the white peaks in
+heaven, to enjoy through his enjoyment, if her own capacity was dead:
+and she had found it revive, up to some recovery of her old songful
+readiness for invocations of pleasure.  Escape and beauty beckoned ahead;
+behind were the chains.  These two letters of the one fact plucked her
+back.  The chained body bore the fluttering spirit: or it was the spirit
+in bonds, that dragged the body.  Both were abashed before the image of
+her girl.  Out of the riddle of her strange Nesta, one thing was clear:
+she did not love the man: and Nataly tasted gladness in that, from the
+cup of poisonous regrets at the thought.  Her girl's heart would not be
+broken.  But if he so strongly loved her, as to hold to this engagement?
+.  .  .  It might then be worse.  She dropped a plumb-line into the young
+man, sounding him by what she knew of him and judged.  She had to revert
+to Nesta's charm, for the assurance of his anchored attachment.
+
+Her holiday took the burden of her trouble, and amid the beauty of a
+disenchanted scene, she resumed the London incubus.
+
+'You told him of her being at the Wells? in the neighbourhood, Victor?'
+
+'Didn't you know, my dear, the family-seat is Cronidge, two miles out
+from the Wells?--and particularly pretty country.'
+
+'I had forgotten, if I ever heard.  You will not let him be in
+ignorance?'
+
+'My dear love, you are pale about it.  This is a matter between men.
+I write, thanking for the honour and so forth; and I appoint an
+interview; and I show him my tablets.  He must be told, necessarily.
+Incidents of this kind come in their turn.  If Dudley does not account
+himself the luckiest young fellow in the kingdom, he's not worthy of his
+good fortune.  I wish they were both here now, honeymooning among these
+peaks, seeing the crescent over one, as we did last night!'
+
+'Have you an idea, in reading Nesta's letter?'
+
+'Seems indifferent?--mere trick to hide the blushes.  And I, too, I'm
+interested in Delphica.  Delphica and Falarique will be fine stage
+business.  Of course, Dr. Bouthoin and his curate!--we know what Old
+England has to expect from Colney.'
+
+'At any rate, Mr. Durance hurts no one.  You will, in your letter,
+appoint the day of the interview?'
+
+'Hurts himself!  Yes, dearest; appoint for--ten days homeward--eleventh
+day from to-day.  And you to Fredi: a bit of description--as you can,
+my Nataly!  Happy to be a dolomite, to be painted by Nataly's pen.'
+
+The sign is evil, when we have a vexatious ringing in the ear of some
+small piece of familiar domestic chatter, and subject it to scrutiny,
+hang on it, worry and magnify it.  What will not creatures under sway of
+the sensational life, catch at to emphasize and strengthen distaste,
+until distaste shall have a semblance of reason, in the period of the
+mind's awakening to revolt!  Nataly shrank from the name of dolomite,
+detested the name, though the scenes regained their beauty or something
+of it beneath her showery vision.  Every time Victor spoke of dolomites
+on the journey homeward, she had at heart an accusation of her cowardice,
+her duplicity, frailty, treachery to the highest of her worship and sole
+support of her endurance in the world: not much blaming him: but the
+degrading view of herself sank them both.  On a shifty soil, down goes
+the idol.  For him she could plead still, for herself she could not.
+
+The smell of the Channel brine inspirited her sufficiently to cast off
+the fit and make it seem, in the main, a bodily depression; owing to
+causes, of which she was beginning to have an apprehensive knowledge: and
+they were not so fearful to her as the gloom they displaced.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Belief in the narrative by promoting nausea in the audience
+Claim for equality puts an end to the priceless privileges
+Consent to take life as it is
+Dialogue between  Nature and Circumstance
+Dudley was not gifted to read behind words and looks
+Exuberant anticipatory trustfulness
+Fell to chatting upon the nothings agreeably and seriously
+Greater our successes, the greater the slaves we become
+He never explained
+How Success derides Ambition!
+If only been intellectually a little flexible in his morality
+Naturally as deceived as he wished to be
+Official wrath at sound of footfall or a fancied one
+Optional marriages, broken or renewed every seven years
+Pessimy is invulnerable
+Repeatedly, in contempt of the disgust of iteration
+Satirist is an executioner by profession
+Semblance of a tombstone lady beside her lord
+The banquet to be fervently remembered, should smoke
+The homage we pay him flatters us
+We must have some excuse, if we would keep to life
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of One Our Conquerors, v3
+by George Meredith
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS
+
+By GEORGE MEREDITH
+
+1897
+
+
+
+BOOK 4.
+
+XXV.      NATALY IN ACTION
+XXVI.     IN WHICH WE SEE A CONVENTIONAL GENTLE MAN ENDEAVOURING TO
+          EXAMINE A SPECTRE OF HIMSELF
+XXVII.    CONTAINS WHAT IS A SMALL THING OR A GREAT, AS THE SOUL OF THE
+          CHIEF ACTOR MAY DECIDE
+XXVIII.   MRS. MARSETT
+XXIX.     SHOWS ONE OF THE SHADOWS OF THE WORLD CROSSING A VIRGIN'S MIND
+XXX.      THE BURDEN UPON NESTA
+XXXI.     SHOWS HOW THE SQUIRES IN A CONQUEROR'S SERVICE HAVE AT TIMES TO
+          DO KNIGHTLY CONQUEST OF THEMSELVES
+XXXII.    SHOWS HOW TEMPER MAY KINDLE TEMPER AND AN INDIGNANT WOMAN GET
+          HER WEAPON
+XXXIII.   A PAIR OF WOOERS
+XXXIV.    CONTAINS DEEDS UNRELATED AND EXPOSITIONS OF FEELINGS
+XXXV.     IN WHICH AGAIN WE MAKE USE OF THE OLD LAMPS FOR LIGHTING AN
+          ABYSMAL DARKNESS
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+NATALY IN ACTION
+
+A ticket of herald newspapers told the world of Victor's returning to his
+London.  Pretty Mrs. Blathenoy was Nataly's first afternoon visitor, and
+was graciously received; no sign of inquiry for the cause of the lady's
+alacrity to greet her being shown.  Colney Durance came in, bringing the
+rumour of an Australian cantatrice to kindle Europe; Mr. Peridon, a
+seeker of tidings from the city of Bourges; Miss Priscilla Graves,
+reporting of Skepsey, in a holiday Sunday tone, that his alcoholic
+partner might at any moment release him; Mr. Septimus Barmby, with a
+hanged heavy look, suggestive of a wharfside crane swinging the ponderous
+thing he had to say.  'I have seen Miss Radnor.'
+
+'She was well?' the mother asked, and the grand basso pitched forth an
+affirmative.
+
+'Dear sweet girl she is!' Mrs. Blathenoy exclaimed to Colney.
+
+He bowed.  'Very sweet.  And can let fly on you, like a haggis, for a
+scratch.'
+
+She laughed, glad of an escape from the conversational formalities
+imposed on her by this Mrs. Victor Radnor's mighty manner.  'But what
+girl worth anything!  .  .  .
+
+We all can do that, I hope, for a scratch!'
+
+Mr. Barmby's Profession dissented.
+
+Mr. Catkin appeared; ten minutes after his Peridon.  He had met Victor
+near the Exchange, and had left him humming the non fu sogno of ERNANI.
+
+'Ah, when Victor takes to Verdi, it's a flat City, and wants a burst of
+drum and brass,' Colney said; and he hummed a few bars of the march in
+Attila, and shrugged.  He and Victor had once admired that blatancy.
+
+Mr. Pempton appeared, according to anticipation.  He sat himself beside
+Priscilla.  Entered Mrs. John Cormyn, voluminous; Mrs. Peter Yatt,
+effervescent; Nataly's own people were about her and she felt at home.
+
+Mrs. Blathenoy pushed a small thorn into it, by speaking of Captain
+Fenellan, and aside, as if sharing him with her.  Nataly heard that
+Dartrey had been the guest of these Blathenoys.  Even Dartrey was but a
+man!
+
+Rather lower under her voice, the vain little creature asked: 'You knew
+her?'
+
+'Her?'
+
+The cool counter-interrogation was disregarded.  'So sad!  In the desert!
+a cup of pure water worth more than barrow-loads of gold!  Poor woman!'
+
+'Who?'
+
+'His wife.'
+
+'Wife!'
+
+'They were married?'
+
+Nataly could have cried: Snake!  Her play at brevity had certainly been
+foiled.  She nodded gravely.  A load of dusky wonders and speculations
+pressed at her bosom.  She disdained to question the mouth which had
+bitten her.
+
+Mrs. Blathenoy, resolving, that despite the jealousy she excited, she
+would have her friend in Captain Fenellan, whom she liked--liked, she was
+sure, quite as innocently as any other woman of his acquaintance did,
+departed and she hugged her innocence defiantly, with the mournful pride
+which will sometimes act as a solvent.
+
+A remark or two passed among the company upon her pretty face.
+
+Nataly murmured to Colney: 'Is there anything of Dartrey's wife?'
+
+'Dead,' he answered.
+
+'When?'
+
+'Months back.  I had it from Simeon.  You didn't hear?'
+
+She shook her head.  Her ears buzzed.  If he had it from Simeon Fenellan,
+Victor must have known it.
+
+Her duties of hostess were conducted with the official smile.
+
+As soon as she stood alone, she dropped on a chair, like one who has
+taken a shot in the heart, and that hideous tumult of wild cries at her
+ears blankly ceased.  Dartrey, Victor, Nesta, were shifting figures of
+the might-have-been for whom a wretched erring woman, washed clean of her
+guilt by death, in a far land, had gone to her end: vainly gone: and now
+another was here, a figure of wood, in man's shape, conjured up by one of
+the three, to divide the two others; likely to be fatal to her or to
+them: to her, she hoped, if the choice was to be: and beneath the leaden
+hope, her heart set to a rapid beating, a fainter, a chill at the core.
+
+She snatched for breath.  She shut her eyes, and with open lips, lay
+waiting; prepared to thank the kindness about to hurry her hence, out of
+the seas of pain, without pain.
+
+Then came sighs.  The sad old servant in her bosom was resuming his
+labours.
+
+But she had been near it--very near it?  A gush of pity for Victor,
+overwhelmed her hardness of mind.
+
+Unreflectingly, she tried her feet to support her, and tottered to the
+door, touched along to the stairs, and descended them, thinking strangely
+upon such a sudden weakness of body, when she would no longer have
+thought herself the weak woman.  Her aim was to reach the library.  She
+sat on the stairs midway, pondering over the length of her journey: and
+now her head was clearer; for she was travelling to get Railway-guides,
+and might have had them from the hands of a footman, and imagined that
+she had considered it prudent to hide her investigation of those books:
+proofs of an understanding fallen backward to the state of infant and
+having to begin our drear ascent again.
+
+A slam of the kitchen stair-door restored her.  She betrayed no infirmity
+of footing as she walked past Arlington in the hall; and she was alive to
+the voice of Skepsey presently on the door-steps.  Arlington brought her
+a note.
+
+Victor had written: 'My love, I dine with Blathenoy in the City, at the
+Walworth.  Business.  Skepsey for clothes.  Eight of us.  Formal.  A
+thousand embraces.  Late.'
+
+Skepsey was ushered in.  His wife had expired at noon, he said; and he
+postured decorously the grief he could not feel, knowing that a lady
+would expect it of him.  His wife had fallen down stone steps; she died
+in hospital.  He wished to say, she was no loss to the country; but he
+was advised within of the prudence of abstaining from comment and
+trusting to his posture, and he squeezed a drop of conventional
+sensibility out of it, and felt improved.
+
+Nataly sent a line to Victor: 'Dearest, I go to bed early, am tired.
+Dine well.  Come to me in the morning.'
+
+She reproached herself for coldness to poor Skepsey, when he had gone.
+The prospect of her being alone until the morning had been so absorbing a
+relief.
+
+She found a relief also in work at the book of the trains.  A walk to the
+telegraph-station strengthened her.  Especially after despatching a
+telegram to Mr. Dudley Sowerby at Cronidge, and one to Nesta at
+Moorsedge, did she become stoutly nerved.  The former was requested to
+meet her at Penhurst station at noon.  Nesta was to be at the station for
+the Wells at three o'clock.
+
+From the time of the flying of these telegrams, up to the tap of Victor's
+knuckle on her bed-room door next morning, she was not more reflectively
+conscious than a packet travelling to its destination by pneumatic tube.
+Nor was she acutely impressionable to the features and the voice she
+loved.
+
+'You know of Skepsey?' she said.
+
+'Ah, poor Skepsey!'  Victor frowned and heaved.
+
+'One of us ought to stand beside him at the funeral.'
+
+'Colney or Fenellan?'
+
+'I will ask Mr. Durance.'
+
+'Do, my darling.'
+
+'Victor, you did not tell me of Dartrey's wife.'
+
+'There again!  They all get released!  Yes, Dartrey! Dartrey has his luck
+too.'
+
+She closed her eyes, with the desire to be asleep.
+
+'You should have told me, dear.'
+
+'Well, my love!  Well--poor Dartrey!  I fancy I hadn't a confirmation of
+the news.  I remember a horrible fit of envy on hearing the hint: not
+much more than a hint: serious illness, was it?--or expected event.
+Hardly worth while to trouble my dear soul, till certain.  Anything about
+wives, forces me to think of myself--my better self!'
+
+'I had to hear of it first from Mrs. Blathenoy.'
+
+'You've heard of duels in dark rooms:--that was the case between
+Blathenoy and me last night for an hour.'
+
+She feigned somnolent fatigue over her feverish weariness of heart.  He
+kissed her on the forehead.
+
+Her spell-bound intention to speak of Dudley Sowerby to him, was broken
+by the sounding of the hall-door, thirty minutes later.  She had lain in
+a trance.
+
+Life surged to her with the thought, that she could decide and take her
+step.  Many were the years back since she had taken a step; less
+independently then than now; unregretted, if fatal.  Her brain was heated
+for the larger view of things and the swifter summing of them.  It could
+put the man at a remove from her and say, that she had lived with him and
+suffered intensely.  It gathered him to her breast rejoicing in their
+union: the sharper the scourge, the keener the exultation.  But she had
+one reproach to deafen and beat down.  This did not come on her from the
+world: she and the world were too much foot to foot on the antagonist's
+line, for her to listen humbly.  It came of her quick summary survey of
+him, which was unnoticed by the woman's present fiery mind as being new
+or strange in any way: simply it was a fact she now read; and it directed
+her to reproach herself for an abasement beneath his leadership, a blind
+subserviency and surrender of her faculties to his greater powers, such
+as no soul of a breathing body should yield to man: not to the highest,
+not to the Titan, not to the most Godlike of men.  Under cloak, they
+demand it.  They demand their bane.
+
+And Victor!  .  .  .  She had seen into him.
+
+The reproach on her was, that she, in her worship, had been slave, not
+helper.  Scarcely was she irreproachable in the character of slave.  If
+it had been utter slave! she phrased the words, for a further reproach.
+She remembered having at times murmured, dissented.  And it would have
+been a desperate proud thought to comfort a slave, that never once had
+she known even a secret opposition to the will of her lord.
+
+But she had: she recalled instances.  Up they rose; up rose everything
+her mind ranged over, subsiding immediately when the service was done.
+She had not conceived her beloved to be infallible, surest of guides in
+all earthly-matters.  Her intellect had sometimes protested.
+
+What, then, had moved her to swamp it?
+
+Her heart answered.  And that heart also was arraigned: and the heart's
+fleshly habitation acting on it besides: so flagellant of herself was
+she: covertly, however, and as the chaste among women can consent to let
+our animal face them.  Not grossly, still perceptibly to her penetrative
+hard eye on herself, she saw the senses of the woman under a charm.  She
+saw, and swam whirling with a pang of revolt from her personal being and
+this mortal kind.
+
+Her rational intelligence righted her speedily.  She could say in truth,
+by proof, she loved the man: nature's love, heart's love, soul's love.
+She had given him her life.
+
+It was a happy cross-current recollection, that the very beginning and
+spring of this wild cast of her life, issued from something he said and
+did (merest of airy gestures) to signify the blessing of life--how good
+and fair it is.  A drooping mood in her had been struck; he had a look
+like the winged lyric up in blue heavens: he raised the head of the young
+flower from its contemplation of grave-mould.  That was when he had much
+to bear: Mrs. Burman present: and when the stranger in their household
+had begun to pity him and have a dread of her feelings.  The lucent
+splendour of his eyes was memorable, a light above the rolling oceans of
+Time.
+
+She had given him her life, little aid.  She might have closely
+counselled, wound in and out with his ideas.  Sensible of capacity, she
+confessed to the having been morally subdued, physically as well; swept
+onward; and she was arrested now by an accident, like a waif of the
+river-floods by the dip of a branch.  Time that it should be!  But was
+not Mr. Durance, inveighing against the favoured system for the education
+of women, right when he declared them to be unfitted to speak an opinion
+on any matter external to the household or in a crisis of the household?
+She had not agreed with him: he presented stinging sentences, which
+irritated more than they enlightened.  Now it seemed to her, that the
+model women of men make pleasant slaves, not true mates: they lack the
+worldly training to know themselves or take a grasp of circumstances.
+
+There is an exotic fostering of the senses for women, not the
+strengthening breath of vital common air.  If good fortune is with them,
+all may go well: the stake of their fates is upon the perpetual smooth
+flow of good fortune.  She had never joined to the cry of the women.  Few
+among them were having it in the breast as loudly.
+
+Hard on herself, too, she perceived how the social rebel had reduced her
+mind to propitiate a simulacrum, reflected from out, of an enthroned
+Society within it, by an advocacy of the existing laws and rules and
+habits.  Eminently servile is the tolerated lawbreaker: none so
+conservative.  Not until we are driven back upon an unviolated Nature,
+do we call to the intellect to think radically: and then we begin to
+think of our fellows.
+
+Or when we have set ourselves in motion direct for the doing of the right
+thing: have quitted the carriage at the station, and secured the ticket,
+and entered the train, counting the passage of time for a simple rapid
+hour before we have eased heart in doing justice to ourself and to
+another; then likewise the mind is lighted for radiation.  That doing of
+the right thing, after a term of paralysis, cowardice--any evil name--
+is one of the mighty reliefs, equal to happiness, of longer duration.
+
+Nataly had it.  But her mind was actually radiating, and the comfort to
+her heart evoked the image of Dartrey Fenellan.  She saw a possible
+reason for her bluntness to the coming scene with Dudley.
+
+At once she said, No!  and closed the curtain; knowing what was behind,
+counting it nought.  She repeated almost honestly her positive negative.
+How we are mixed of the many elements!  she thought, as an observer; and
+self-justifyingly thought on, and with truth, that duty urged her upon
+this journey; and proudly thought, that she had not a shock of the
+painful great organ in her breast at the prospect at the end, or any
+apprehension of its failure to carry her through.
+
+Yet the need of peace or some solace needed to prepare her for her
+interview turned her imagination burningly on Dartrey.  She would not
+allow herself to meditate over hopes and schemes:--Nesta free: Dartrey
+free.  She vowed to her soul sacredly--and she was one of those in whom
+the Divinity lives, that they may do so--not to speak a word for the
+influencing of Dudley save the one fact.  Consequently, for a personal
+indulgence, she mused; she caressed maternally the object of her musing;
+of necessity, she excluded Nesta; but in tenderness she gave Dartrey a
+fair one to love him.
+
+The scene was waved away.  That one so loving him, partly worthy of him,
+ready to traverse the world now beside him--who could it be other than
+she who knew and prized his worth?  Foolish!  It is one of the hatefuller
+scourges upon women whenever, a little shaken themselves, they muse upon
+some man's image, that they cannot put in motion the least bit of drama
+without letting feminine self play a part; generally to develop into a
+principal part.  .  . The apology makes it a melancholy part.
+
+Dartrey's temper of the caged lion dominated by his tamer, served as
+keynote for any amount of saddest colouring.  He controlled the brute:
+but he held the contempt of danger, the love of strife, the passion for
+adventure; he had crossed the desert of human anguish.  He of all men
+required a devoted mate, merited her.  Of all men living, he was the
+hardest to match with a woman--with a woman deserving him.
+
+The train had quitted London.  Now for the country, now for free
+breathing!  She who two days back had come from Alps, delighted in the
+look on flat green fields.  It was under the hallucination of her saying
+in flight adieu to them, and to England; and, that somewhere hidden, to
+be found in Asia, Africa, America, was the man whose ideal of life was
+higher than enjoyment.  His caged brute of a temper offered opportunities
+for delicious petting; the sweetest a woman can bestow: it lifts her out
+of timidity into an adoration still palpitatingly fearful.  Ah, but
+familiarity, knowledge, confirmed assurance of his character, lift her to
+another stage, above the pleasures.  May she not prove to him how really
+matched with him she is, to disdain the pleasures, cheerfully accept the
+burdens, meet death, if need be; readily face it as the quietly grey to-
+morrow: at least, show herself to her hero for a woman--the incredible
+being to most men--who treads the terrors as well as the pleasures of
+humanity beneath her feet, and may therefore have some pride in her
+stature.  Ay, but only to feel the pride of standing not so shamefully
+below his level beside him.
+
+Woods were flying past the carriage-windows.  Her solitary companion was
+of the class of the admiring gentlemen.  Presently he spoke.  She
+answered.  He spoke again.  Her mouth smiled, and her accompanying look
+of abstract benevolence arrested the tentative allurement to
+conversation.
+
+New ideas were set revolving in her.  Dartrey and Victor grew to a
+likeness; they became hazily one man, and the mingled phantom
+complimented her on her preserving a good share of the beauty of her
+youth.  The face perhaps: the figure rather too well suits the years!
+she replied.  To reassure her, this Dartrey-Victor drew her close and
+kissed her; and she was confused and passed into the breast of Mrs.
+Burman expecting an operation at the hands of the surgeons.  The train
+had stopped.  'Penhurst?' she said.
+
+'Penhurst is the next station,' said the gentleman.  Here was a theme for
+him!  The stately mansion, the noble grounds, and Sidney!  He discoursed
+of them.
+
+The handsome lady appeared interested.  She was interested also by his
+description of a neighbouring village, likely one hundred years hence to
+be a place of pilgrimage for Americans and for Australians.  Age, he
+said, improves true beauty; and his eyelids indicated a levelling to
+perform the soft intentness.  Mechanically, a ball rose in her throat;
+the remark was illuminated by a saying of Colney's, with regard to his
+countrymen at the play of courtship.  No laughter came.  The gentleman
+talked on.
+
+All fancies and internal communications left her.  Slowness of motion
+brought her to the plain piece of work she had to do, on a colourless
+earth, that seemed foggy; but one could see one's way.  Resolution is a
+form of light, our native light in this dubious world.
+
+Dudley Sowerby opened her carriage-door.  They greeted.
+
+'You have seen Nesta?' she said.
+
+'Not for two days.  You have not heard?  The Miss Duvidneys have gone to
+Brighton.'
+
+'They are rather in advance of the Season.'
+
+She thanked him for meeting her.  He was grateful for the summons.
+
+Informing the mother of his betrothed, that he had ridden over from
+Cronidge, he speculated on the place to select for her luncheon, and he
+spoke of his horse being led up and down outside the station.  Nataly
+inquired for the hour of the next train to London.  He called to one of
+the porters, obtained and imparted the time; evidently now, as shown by
+an unevenness of his lifted brows, expecting news of some little weight.
+
+'Your husband is quite well?' he said, in affection for the name of
+husband.
+
+'Mr. Radnor is well; I have to speak to you; I have more than time.'
+
+'You will lunch at the inn?'
+
+'I shall not eat.  We will walk.'
+
+They crossed the road and passed under trees.
+
+'My mother was to have called on the Miss Duvidneys.  They left
+hurriedly; I think it was unanticipated by Nesta.  I venture .  .  .  you
+pardon the liberty .  .  .  she allows me to entertain hopes.  Mr.
+Radnor, I am hardly too bold in thinking .  .  .  I trust, in appealing
+to you .  .  .  at least I can promise!
+
+'Mr. Sowerby, you have done my daughter the honour to ask her hand in
+marriage.'
+
+He said: 'I have,' and had much to say besides, but deferred: a blow was
+visible.  The father had been more encouraging to him than the mother.
+
+'You have not known of any circumstance that might cause hesitation in
+asking?'
+
+'Miss Radnor?'
+
+'My daughter:--you have to think of your family.'
+
+'Indeed, Mrs. Radnor, I was coming to London tomorrow, with the consent
+of my family.'
+
+'You address me as Mrs. Radnor.  I have not the legal right to the name.'
+
+'Not legal!' said he, with a catch at the word.
+
+He spun round in her sight, though his demeanour was manfully rigid.
+
+'Have I understood, madam .  .  . ?'
+
+'You would not request me to repeat it.  Is that your horse the man is
+leading?'
+
+'My horse: it must be my horse.'
+
+'Mount and ride back.  Leave me: I shall not eat.  Reflect, by yourself.
+You are in a position of one who is not allowed to decide by his
+feelings.  Mr. Radnor you know where to find.'
+
+'But surely, some food?  I cannot have misapprehended?'
+
+'I cannot eat.  I think you have understood me clearly.'
+
+'You wish me to go?'
+
+'I beg.'
+
+'It pains me, dear madam.'
+
+'It relieves me, if you will.  Here is your horse.'
+
+She gave her hand.  He touched it and bent.  He looked at her.  A surge
+of impossible questions rolled to his mouth and rolled back, with the
+thought of an incredible thing, that her manner, more than her words,
+held him from doubting.
+
+'I obey you,' he said.
+
+'You are kind.'
+
+He mounted horse, raised hat, paced on, and again bowing, to one of the
+wayside trees, cantered.  The man was gone; but not from Nataly's vision
+that face of wet chalk under one of the shades of fire.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+IN WHICH WE SEE A CONVENTIONAL GENTLEMAN ENDEAVOURING TO EXAMINE A
+SPECTRE OF HIMSELF
+
+Dudley rode back to Cronidge with his thunderstroke.  It filled him,
+as in those halls of political clamour, where explanatory speech is not
+accepted, because of a drowning tide of hot blood on both sides.  He
+sought to win attention by submitting a resolution, to the effect, that
+he would the next morning enter into the presence of Mr. Victor Radnor,
+bearing his family's feelings, for a discussion upon them.  But the
+brutish tumult, in addition to surcharging, encased him: he could not
+rightly conceive the nature of feelings: men were driving shoals; he had
+lost hearing and touch of individual men; had become a house of angrily
+opposing parties.
+
+He was hurt, he knew; and therefore he supposed himself injured, though
+there were contrary outcries, and he admitted that he stood free; he had
+not been inextricably deceived.
+
+The girl was caught away to the thinnest of wisps in a dust-whirl.
+Reverting to the father and mother, his idea of a positive injury, that
+was not without its congratulations, sank him down among his disordered
+deeper sentiments; which were a diver's wreck, where an armoured livid
+subtermarine, a monstrous puff-ball of man, wandered seriously light in
+heaviness; trembling his hundredweights to keep him from dancing like a
+bladder-block of elastic lumber; thinking occasionally, amid the mournful
+spectacle, of the atmospheric pipe of communication with the world above,
+whereby he was deafened yet sustained.  One tug at it, and he was up on
+the surface, disengaged from the hideous harness, joyfully no more that
+burly phantom cleaving green slime, free!  and the roaring stopped; the
+world looked flat, foreign, a place of crusty promise.  His wreck,
+animated by the dim strange fish below, appeared fairer; it winked
+lurefully when abandoned.
+
+The internal state of a gentleman who detested intangible metaphor as
+heartily as the vulgarest of our gobblegobbets hate it, metaphor only can
+describe; and for the reason, that he had in him just something more than
+is within the compass of the language of the meat-markets.  He had--and
+had it not the less because he fain would not have had--sufficient stuff
+to furnish forth a soul's epic encounter between Nature and Circumstance:
+and metaphor, simile, analysis, all the fraternity of old lamps for
+lighting our abysmal darkness, have to be rubbed, that we may get a
+glimpse of the fray.
+
+Free, and rejoicing; without the wish to be free; at the same time humbly
+and sadly acquiescing in the stronger claim of his family to pronounce
+the decision: such was the second stage of Dudley's perturbation after
+the blow.  A letter of Nesta's writing was in his pocket: he knew her
+address.  He could not reply to her until he had seen her father: and
+that interview remained necessarily prospective until he had come to his
+exact resolve, not omitting his critical approval of the sentences giving
+it shape, stamp, dignity--a noble's crest, as it were.
+
+Nesta wrote briefly.  The apostrophe was, 'Dear Mr. Sowerby.'  She had
+engaged to send her address.  Her father had just gone.  The Miss
+Duvidneys had left the hotel yesterday for the furnished house facing the
+sea.  According to arrangements, she had a livery-stable hack, and had
+that morning trotted out to the downs with a riding-master and company,
+one of whom was 'an agreeable lady.'
+
+He noticed approvingly her avoidance of an allusion to the 'Delphica' of
+Mr. Durance's incomprehensible serial story, or whatever it was; which,
+as he had shown her, annoyed him, for its being neither fact nor fun; and
+she had insisted on the fun; and he had painfully tried to see it or
+anything of a meaning; and it seemed to him now, that he had been
+humiliated by the obedience to her lead: she had offended by her harping
+upon Delphica.  However, here it was unmentioned.  He held the letter out
+to seize it in the large, entire.
+
+Her handwriting was good, as good as the writing of the most agreeable
+lady on earth.  Dudley did not blame her for letting the lady be deceived
+in her--if she knew her position.  She might be ignorant of it.  And to
+strangers, to chance acquaintances, even to friends, the position, of the
+loathsome name, was not materially important.  Marriage altered the view.
+He sided with his family.
+
+He sided, edgeing away, against his family.  But a vision of the earldom
+coming to him, stirred reverential objections, composed of all which his
+unstained family could protest in religion, to repudiate an alliance with
+a stained house, and the guilty of a condonation of immorality.  Who
+would have imagined Mr. Radnor a private sinner flaunting for one of the
+righteous?  And she, the mother, a lady--quite a lady; having really a
+sense of duty, sense of honour!  That she must be a lady, Dudley was
+convinced.  He beheld through a porous crape, woven of formal
+respectfulness, with threads of personal disgust, the scene, striking him
+drearly like a distant great mansion's conflagration across moorland at
+midnight, of a lady's breach of bonds and plunge of all for love.  How
+had it been concealed?  In Dudley's upper sphere, everything was exposed:
+Scandal walked naked and unashamed-figurante of the polite world.  But
+still this lady was of the mint and coin, a true lady.  Handsome now, she
+must have been beautiful.  And a comprehensible pride (for so would
+Dudley have borne it) keeps the forsaken man silent up to death: .  .  .
+grandly silent; but the loss of such a woman is enough to kill a man!
+Not in time, though!  Legitimacy evidently, by the mother's confession,
+cannot protect where it is wanted.  Dudley was optically affected by a
+round spot of the world swinging its shadow over Nesta.
+
+He pitied, and strove to be sensible of her.  The effort succeeded so
+well, that he was presently striving to be insensible.  The former state,
+was the mounting of a wall; the latter, was a sinking through a chasm.
+There would be family consultations, abhorrent; his father's agonized
+amazement at the problem presented to a family of scrupulous principles
+and pecuniary requirements; his mother's blunt mention of the abominable
+name--mediaevally vindicated in champions of certain princely families
+indeed, but morally condemned; always under condemnation of the Church: a
+blot: and handed down: Posterity, and it might be a titled posterity,
+crying out.  A man in the situation of Dudley could not think solely of
+himself.  The nobles of the land are bound in honour to their posterity.
+There you have one of the prominent permanent distinctions between them
+and the commonalty.
+
+His mother would again propose her chosen bride for him: Edith Averst,
+with the dowry of a present one thousand pounds per annum, and prospect
+of six or so, excluding Sir John's estate, Carping, in Leicestershire;
+a fair estate, likely to fall to Edith; consumption seized her brothers
+as they ripened.  A fair girl too; only Dudley did not love her; he
+wanted to love.  He was learning the trick from this other one, who had
+become obscured and diminished, tainted, to the thought of her; yet not
+extinct.  Sight of her was to be dreaded.
+
+Unguiltily tainted, in herself she was innocent.  That constituted the
+unhappy invitation to him to swallow one half of his feelings, which had
+his world's blessing on it, for the beneficial enlargement and
+enthronement of the baser unblest half, which he hugged and distrusted.
+Can innocence issue of the guilty?  He asked it, hopeing it might be
+possible: he had been educated in his family to believe, that the laws
+governing human institutions are divine--until History has altered them.
+They are altered, to present a fresh bulwark against the infidel.  His
+conservative mind, retiring in good order, occupied the next rearward
+post of resistance.  Secretly behind it, the man was proud of having a
+heart to beat for the cause of the besiegeing enemy, in the present
+instance.  When this was blabbed to him, and he had owned it, he
+attributed his weakness to excess of nature, the liking for a fair face.
+--Oh, but more!  spirit was in the sweet eyes.  She led him--she did lead
+him in spiritual things; led him out of common circles of thought, into
+refreshing new spheres; he had reminiscences of his having relished the
+juices of the not quite obviously comic, through her indications: and
+really, in spite of her inferior flimsy girl's education, she could boast
+her acquirements; she was quick, startlingly; modest, too, in commerce
+with a slower mind that carried more; though she laughed and was a needle
+for humour: she taught him at times to put away his contempt of the
+romantic; she had actually shown him, that his expressed contempt of it
+disguised a dread: as it did, and he was conscious of the foolishness of
+it now while pursuing her image, while his intelligence and senses gave
+her the form and glory of young morning.
+
+Wariness counselled him to think it might be merely the play of her
+youth; and also the disposition of a man in harness of business,
+exaggeratingly to prize an imagined finding of the complementary feminine
+of himself.  Venerating purity as he did, the question, whether the very
+sweetest of pure young women, having such an origin, must not at some
+time or other show trace of the origin, surged up.  If he could only have
+been sure of her moral exemption from taint, a generous ardour, in
+reserve behind his anxious dubieties, would have precipitated Dudley to
+quench disapprobation and brave the world under a buckler of those
+monetary advantages, which he had but stoutly to plead with the House of
+Cantor, for the speedy overcoming of a reluctance to receive the nameless
+girl and prodigious heiress.  His family's instruction of him, and his
+inherited tastes, rendered the aspect of a Nature stripped of the
+clothing of the laws offensive down to devilish: we grant her certain
+steps, upon certain conditions accompanied by ceremonies; and when she
+violates them, she becomes visibly again the revolutionary wicked old
+beast bent on levelling our sacredest edifices.  An alliance with any of
+her votaries, appeared to Dudley as an act of treason to his house, his
+class, and his tenets.  And nevertheless he was haunted by a cry of
+criminal happiness for and at the commission of the act.
+
+He would not decide to be 'precipitate,' and the days ran their course,
+until Lady Grace Halley arrived at Cronidge, a widow.  Lady Cantor spoke
+to her of Dudley's unfathomable gloom.  Lady Grace took him aside.
+
+She said, without preface: 'You've heard, have you!'
+
+'You were aware of it?' said he, and his tone was irritable with a
+rebuke.
+
+'Coming through town, for the first time yesterday.  I had it--of all
+men!--from a Sir Abraham Quatley, to whom I was recommended to go, about
+my husband's shares in a South American Railway; and we talked, and it
+came out.  He knows; he says, it is not generally known; and he likes,
+respects Mr. Victor Radnor; we are to keep the secret.  Hum?  He had
+heard of your pretensions; and our relationship, etc.: "esteemed" it--
+you know the City dialect--his duty to mention, etc.  That was after I
+had spied on his forehead the something I wormed out of his mouth.  What
+are you going to do?'
+
+'What can I do!'
+
+'Are you fond of the girl?'
+
+An attachment was indicated, as belonging to the case.  She was not a
+woman to whom the breathing of pastoral passion would be suitable; yet he
+saw that she despised him for a lover; and still she professed to
+understand his dilemma.  Perplexity at the injustice of fate and persons
+universally, put a wrinkled mask on his features and the expression of
+his feelings.  They were torn, and the world was torn; and what he
+wanted, was delay, time for him to define his feelings and behold a
+recomposed picture of the world.  He had already taken six days.  He
+pleaded the shock to his family.
+
+'You won't have such a chance again,' she said.  Shrugs had set in.
+
+They agreed as to the behaviour of the girl's mother.  It reflected on
+the father, he thought.
+
+'Difficult thing to proclaim, before an engagement!' Her shoulders were
+restless.
+
+'When a man's feelings get entangled!'
+
+'Oh!  a man's feelings!  I'm your British Jury for, a woman's.'
+
+'He has married her?'
+
+She declared to not knowing particulars.  She could fib smoothly.
+
+The next day she was on the line to London, armed with the proposal of an
+appointment for the Hon. Dudley to meet 'the girl's father.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+CONTAINS WHAT IS A SMALL THING OR A GREAT, AS THE SOUL OF THE CHIEF ACTOR
+MAY DECIDE
+
+Skepsey ushered Lady Grace into his master's private room, and
+entertained her during his master's absence.  He had buried his wife, he
+said: she feared, seeing his posture of the soaping of hands at one
+shoulder, that he was about to bewail it; and he did wish to talk of it,
+to show his modest companionship with her in loss, and how a consolation
+for our sorrows may be obtained: but he won her approval, by taking the
+acceptable course between the dues to the subject and those to his
+hearer, as a model cab should drive considerate equally of horse and
+fare.
+
+A day of holiday at Hampstead, after the lowering of the poor woman's
+bones into earth, had been followed by a descent upon London; and at
+night he had found himself in the immediate neighbourhood of a public
+house, noted for sparring exhibitions and instructions on the first
+floor; and he was melancholy, unable quite to disperse 'the ravens'
+flocking to us on such days: though, if we ask why we have to go out of
+the world, there is a corresponding inquiry, of what good was our coming
+into it; and unless we are doing good work for our country, the answer is
+not satisfactory--except, that we are as well gone.  Thinking which, he
+was accosted by a young woman: perfectly respectable, in every way: who
+inquired if he had seen a young man enter the door.  She described him,
+and reviled the temptations of those houses; and ultimately, as she
+insisted upon going in to look for the young man and use her persuasions
+to withdraw him from 'that snare of Satan,' he had accompanied her, and
+he had gone upstairs and brought the young man down.  But friends, or the
+acquaintances they call friends, were with him, and they were 'in drink,'
+and abused the young woman; and she had her hand on the young man's arm,
+quoting Scripture.  Sad to relate of men bearing the name of Englishmen--
+and it was hardly much better if they pleaded intoxication!--they were
+not content to tear the young man from her grasp, they hustled her,
+pushed her out, dragged her in the street.
+
+'It became me to step to her defence: she was meek,' said Skepsey.  'She
+had a great opinion of the efficacy of quotations from Scripture; she did
+not recriminate.  I was able to release her and the young man she
+protected, on condition of my going upstairs to give a display of my
+proficiency.  I had assured them, that the poor fellows who stood against
+me were not a proper match.  And of course, they jeered, but they had the
+evidence, on the pavement.  So I went up with them.  I was heavily
+oppressed, I wanted relief, I put on the gloves.  He was a bigger man;
+they laughed at the little one.  I told them, it depended upon a
+knowledge of first principles, and the power to apply them.  I will not
+boast, my lady: my junior by ten years, the man went down; he went down a
+second time; and the men seemed surprised; I told them, it was nothing
+but first principles put into action.  I mention the incident, for the
+extreme relief it afforded me at the close of a dark day.'
+
+'So you cured your grief !' said Lady Grace; and Skepsey made way for his
+master.
+
+Victor's festival-lights were kindled, beholding her; cressets on the
+window-sill, lamps inside.
+
+'Am I so welcome?'  There was a pull of emotion at her smile.  'What with
+your little factotum and you, we are flattered to perdition when we come
+here.  He has been proposing, by suggestion, like a Court-physician, the
+putting on of his boxing-gloves, for the consolation of the widowed:--
+meant most kindly!  and it's a thousand pities women haven't their padded
+gloves.'
+
+'Oh!  but our boxing-gloves can do mischief enough.  You have something
+to say, I see.'
+
+'How do you see?'
+
+'Tusk, tush.'
+
+The silly ring of her voice and the pathless tattle changed; she talked
+to suit her laden look.  'You hit it.  I come from Dudley.  He knows the
+facts.  I wish to serve you, in every way.'
+
+Victor's head had lifted.
+
+'Who was it?'
+
+'No enemy.'
+
+'Her mother.  She did rightly!
+
+'Certainly she did,' said Victor, and he thought that instantaneously of
+the thing done.  'Oh, then she spoke to him!  She has kept it from me.
+For now nearly a week--six days--I've seen her spying for something she
+expected, like a face behind a door three inches ajar.  She has not been
+half alive; she refused explanations;--she was expecting to hear from
+him, of him:--the decision, whatever it's to be!'
+
+'I can't aid you there,' said Lady Grace.  'He's one of the unreadables.
+He names Tuesday next week.'
+
+'By all means.'
+
+'She?'
+
+'Fredi?--poor Fredi!--ah, my poor girl, yes!--No, she knows nothing.
+Here is the truth of it.--she, the legitimate, lives: they say she lives.
+Well, then, she lives against all rules physical or medical, lives by
+sheer force of will--it's a miracle of the power of a human creature to
+.  .  .  I have it from doctors, friends, attendants, they can't guess
+what she holds on, to keep her breath.  All the happiness in life!--if
+only it could benefit her.  But it 's the cause of death to us.  Do you
+see, dear friend;--you are a friend, proved friend,' he took her hand,
+and held and pressed it, in great need of a sanguine response to
+emphasis; and having this warm feminine hand, his ideas ran off with it.
+'The friend I need!  You have courage.  My Nataly, poor dear--she can
+endure, in her quiet way.  A woman of courage would take her place beside
+me and compel the world to do her homage, help;--a bright ready smile
+does it!  She would never be beaten.  Of course, we could have lived
+under a bushel--stifled next to death!  But I am for light, air-battle,
+if you like.  I want a comrade, not a--not that I complain.  I respect,
+pity, love--I do love her, honour: only, we want something else--courage
+--to face the enemy.  Quite right, that she should speak to Dudley
+Sowerby.  He has to know, must know; all who deal closely with us must
+know.  But see a moment: I am waiting to see the impediment dispersed,
+which puts her at an inequality with the world: and then I speak to all
+whom it concerns--not before: for her sake.  How is it now?  Dudley will
+ask .  .  .  you understand.  And when I am forced to confess, that the
+mother, the mother of the girl he seeks in marriage, is not yet in that
+state herself, probably at that very instant the obstacle has crumbled to
+dust!  I say, probably: I have information--doctors, friends, attendants
+--they all declare it cannot last outside a week.  But you are here--
+true, I could swear! a touch of a hand tells me.  A woman's hand?  Well,
+yes: I read by the touch of a woman's hand:--betrays more than her looks
+or her lips!'  He sank his voice.  'I don't talk of condoling: if you are
+in grief, you know I share it.'  He kissed her hand, and laid it on her
+lap; eyed it, and met her eyes; took a header into her eyes, and lost
+himself.  A nip of his conscience moved his tongue to say: 'As for guilt,
+if it were known .  .  .  a couple of ascetics--absolutely!'  But this
+was assumed to be unintelligible; and it was merely the apology to his
+conscience in communion with the sprite of a petticoated fair one who was
+being subjected to tender little liberties, necessarily addressed in
+enigmas.  He righted immediately, under a perception of the
+thoroughbred's contempt for the barriers of wattled sheep; and caught
+the word 'guilt,' to hide the Philistine citizen's lapse, by relating
+historically, in abridgement, the honest beauty of the passionate loves
+of the two whom the world proscribed for honestly loving.  There was no
+guilt.  He harped on the word, to erase the recollection of his first use
+of it.
+
+'Fiddle,' said Lady Grace.  'The thing happened.  You have now to carry
+it through.  You require a woman's aid in a social matter.  Rely on me,
+for what I can do.  You will see Dudley on Tuesday?  I will write.  Be
+plain with him; not forgetting the gilding, I need not remark.  Your
+Nesta has no aversion?'
+
+'Admires, respects, likes; is quite--is willing.'
+
+'Good enough beginning.'  She rose, for the atmosphere was heated, rather
+heavy.  'And if one proves to be of aid, you'll own that a woman has her
+place in the battle.'
+
+The fair black-clad widow's quick and singular interwreathing of the
+evanescent pretty pouts and frowns dimpled like the brush of the wind on
+a sunny pool in a shady place; and her forehead was close below his chin,
+her lips not far.  Her apparel was attractively mourning.
+
+Widows in mourning, when they do not lean over extremely to the Stygian
+shore, with the complexions of the drugs which expedited the defunct to
+the ferry, provoke the manly arm within reach of them to pluck their
+pathetic blooming persons clean away from it.  What of the widow who
+visibly likes the living?  Compassion; sympathy, impulse; and gratitude,
+impulse again, living warmth; and a spring of the blood to wrestle with
+the King of Terrors for the other poor harper's half-night capped
+Eurydice; and a thirst, sudden as it is overpowering; and the solicitude,
+a reflective solicitude, to put the seal on a thing and call it a fact,
+to the astonishment of history; and a kick of our naughty youth in its
+coffin; all the insurgencies of Nature, with her colonel of the regiment
+absent, and her veering trick to drive two vessels at the cross of a
+track into collision, combine for doing that, which is very much more,
+and which affects us at times so much less than did the pressure of a
+soft wedded hand by our own elsewhere pledged one.  On the contrary, we
+triumph, we have the rich flavour of the fruit for our pains; we
+commission the historian to write in hieroglyphs a round big fact.
+
+The lady passed through the trial submitting, stiffening her shoulders,
+and at the close, shutting her eyes.  She stood cool in her blush, and
+eyed him, like one gravely awakened.  Having been embraced and kissed,
+she had to consider her taste for the man, and acknowledge a neatness
+of impetuosity in the deed; and he was neither apologizing culprit nor
+glorying-bandit when it was done, but something of the lyric God
+tempering his fervours to a pleased sereneness, not offering a renewal
+of them.  He glowed transparently.  He said: 'You are the woman to take
+a front place in the battle!'  With this woman beside him, it was a
+conquered world.
+
+Comparisons, in the jotting souvenirs of a woman of her class and set,
+favoured him; for she disliked enterprising libertines and despised
+stumbling youths; and the genial simple glow of his look assured her,
+that the vanished fiery moment would not be built on by a dating master.
+She owned herself.  Or did she?  Some understanding of how the other
+woman had been won to the leap with him, was drawing in about her.  She
+would have liked to beg for the story; and she could as little do that as
+bring her tongue to reproach.  If we come to the den! she said to her
+thought of reproach.  Our semi-civilization makes it a den, where a scent
+in his nostrils will spring the half-tamed animal away to wildness.  And
+she had come unanticipatingly, without design, except perhaps to get a
+superior being to direct and restrain a gambler's hand perhaps for the
+fee of a temporary pressure.
+
+'I may be able to help a little--I hope!' she fetched a breath to say,
+while her eyelids mildly sermonized; and immediately she talked of her
+inheritance of property in stocks and shares.
+
+Victor commented passingly on the soundness of them, and talked of
+projects he entertained:--Parliament!  'But I have only to mention it at
+home, and my poor girl will set in for shrinking.'
+
+He doated on the diverse aspect of the gallant woman of the world.
+
+'You succeed in everything you do,' said she, and she cordially believed
+it; and that belief set the neighbour memory palpitating.  Success folded
+her waist, was warm upon her lips: she worshipped the figure of Success.
+
+'I can't consent to fail, it's true, when my mind is on a thing,' Victor
+rejoined.
+
+He looked his mind on Lady Grace.  The shiver of a maid went over her.
+These transparent visages, where the thought which is half design is
+perceived as a lightning, strike lightning into the physically feebler.
+Her hand begged, with the open palm, her head shook thrice; and though
+she did not step back, he bowed to the negation, and then she gave him a
+grateful shadow of a smile, relieved, with a startled view of how greatly
+relieved, by that sympathetic deference in the wake of the capturing
+intrepidity.
+
+'I am to name Tuesday for Dudley?' she suggested.
+
+'At any hour he pleases to appoint.'
+
+'A visit signifies .  .  .'
+
+'Whatever it signifies!'
+
+'I'm thinking of the bit of annoyance.'
+
+'To me?  Anything appointed, finds me ready the next minute.'
+
+Her smile was flatteringly bright.  'By the way, keep your City people
+close about you: entertain as much as possible; dine them,' she said.
+
+'At home?'
+
+'Better.  Sir Rodwell Blachington, Sir Abraham Quatley: and their wives.
+There's no drawing back now.  And I will meet them.'
+
+She received a compliment.  She was on the foot to go.
+
+But she had forgotten the Tiddler mine.
+
+The Tiddler mine was leisurely mounting.  Victor stated the figures; he
+saluted her hand, and Lady Grace passed out, with her heart on the top of
+them, and a buzz about it of the unexpected having occurred She had her
+experiences to match new patterns in events; though not very many.
+Compared with gambling, the game of love was an idle entertainment.
+Compared with other players, this man was gifted.
+
+Victor went in to Mr. Inchling's room, and kept Inchling from speaking,
+that he might admire him for he knew not what, or knew not well what.
+The good fellow was devoted to his wife.  Victor in old days had called
+the wife Mrs. Grundy.  She gossiped, she was censorious; she knew--could
+not but know--the facts; yet never by a shade was she disrespectful.  He
+had a curious recollection of how his knowledge of Inchling and his wife
+being always in concert, entirely--whatever they might think in private
+--devoted to him in action, had influenced, if it had not originally
+sprung, his resolve to cast off the pestilential cloak of obscurity
+shortening his days, and emerge before a world he could illumine to give
+him back splendid reflections.  Inchling and his wife, it was: because
+the two were one: and if one, and subservient to him, knowing all the
+story, why, it foreshadowed a conquered world.
+
+They were the one pulse of the married Grundy beating in his hand.  So it
+had been.
+
+He rattled his views upon Indian business, to hold Inchling silent, and
+let his mind dwell almost lovingly on the good faithful spouse, who had
+no phosphorescent writing of a recent throbbing event on the four walls
+of his room.
+
+Nataly was not so generously encountered in idea.
+
+He felt and regretted this.  He greeted her with a doubled
+affectionateness.  Her pitiable deficiency of courage, excusing a man for
+this and that small matter in the thick of the conflict, made demands on
+him for gentle treatment.
+
+'You have not seen any one?' she asked.
+
+'City people.  And you, my love?'
+
+'Mr. Barmby called.  He has gone down to Tunbridge Wells for a week, to
+some friend there.'  She added, in pain of thought: 'I have seen Dartrey.
+He has brought Lord Clanconan to town, for a consultation, and expects he
+will have to take him to Brighton.'
+
+'Brighton?  What a life for a man like Dartrey, at Brighton!'
+
+Her breast heaved.  'If I cannot see my Nesta there, he will bring her up
+to me for a day:
+
+'But, my dear, I will bring her up to you, if it is your wish to see
+her.'
+
+'It is becoming imperative that I should.'
+
+'No hurry, no hurry: wait till the end of next week.  And I must see
+Dartrey, on business, at once!'
+
+She gave the address in a neighbouring square.  He had minutes to spare
+before dinner, and flew.  She was not inquisitive.
+
+Colney Durance had told Dartrey that Victor was killing her.  She had
+little animation; her smiles were ready, but faint.  After her interview
+with Dudley, there had been a swoon at home; and her maid, sworn to
+secrecy, willingly spared a tender-hearted husband--so good a master.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+MRS. MARSETT
+
+Little acts of kindness were not beyond the range of Colney Durance,
+and he ran down to Brighton, to give the exiled Nesta some taste of her
+friendly London circle.  The Duvidney ladies knew that the dreaded
+gentleman had a regard for the girl.  Their own, which was becoming
+warmer than they liked to think, was impressed by his manner of
+conversing with her.  'Child though she was,' he paid her the compliment
+of a sober as well as a satirical review of the day's political matter
+and recent publications; and the ladies were introduced, in a wonderment,
+to the damsel Delphica.  They listened placidly to a discourse upon her
+performances, Japanese to their understandings.
+
+At New York, behold, another adventurous representative and advocate
+of the European tongues has joined the party: Signor Jeridomani: a
+philologer, of course; a politician in addition; Macchiavelli redivivus,
+it seems to fair Delphica.  The speech he delivers at the Syndicate
+Delmonico Dinner, is justly applauded by the New York Press as a
+masterpiece of astuteness.  He appears to be the only one of the party
+who has an eye for the dark.  She fancies she may know a more widely
+awake in the abstract.  But now, thanks to jubilant Journals and Homeric
+laughter over the Continent, the secret is out, in so far as the
+concurrents are all unmasked and exposed for the edification of the
+American public.  Dr. Bouthoin's eyebrows are up, Mr. Semhians disfigures
+his name by greatly gaping.  Shall they return to their Great Britain
+indignant?  Patriotism, with the sauce of a luxurious expedition at no
+cost to the private purse, restrains them.  Moreover, there is no sign of
+any one of the others intending to quit the expedition; and Mr. Semhians
+has done a marvel or two in the cricket-field: Old England looks up where
+she can.  What is painfully extraordinary to our couple, they find in the
+frigid attitude of the Americans toward their 'common tongue'; together
+with the rumour of a design to despatch an American rival emissary to
+Japan.
+
+Nesta listened, inquired, commented, laughed; the ladies could not have a
+doubt that she was interested and understood.  She would have sketches of
+scenes between Delphica and M. Falarique, with whom the young Germania
+was cleverly ingenuous indeed--a seminary Celimene; and between Delphica
+and M. Mytharete, with whom she was archaeological, ravishingly amoebaean
+of Homer.  Dr. Gannius holds a trump card in his artless daughter,
+conjecturally, for the establishment of the language of the gutturals in
+the far East.  He has now a suspicion, that the inventive M. Falarique,
+melted down to sobriety by misfortune, may some day startle their camp by
+the cast of more than a crow into it, and he is bent on establishing
+alliances; frightens the supple Signor Jeridomani to lingual fixity;
+eulogizes Football, with Dr. Bouthoin; and retracts, or modifies, his
+dictum upon the English, that, 'masculine brawn they have in their
+bodies, but muscle they have not in their feminine minds'; to exalt them,
+for a signally clean, if a dense, people: 'Amousia, not Alousia, is their
+enemy:'--How, when we have the noblest crop of poets?  'You have never
+heartily embraced those aliens among you until you learnt from us, that
+you might brag of them.'--Have they not endowed us with the richest of
+languages?  'The words of which are used by you, as old slippers, for
+puns.'  Mr. Semhians has been superciliously and ineffectively punning in
+foreign presences: he and his chief are inwardly shocked by a new
+perception; What if, now that we have the populace for paymaster,
+subservience to the literary tastes of the populace should reduce the
+nation to its lowest mental level, and render us not only unable to
+compete with the foreigner, but unintelligible to him, although so
+proudly paid at home!  Is it not thus that nations are seen of the
+Highest to be devouring themselves?
+
+'For,' says Dr. Gannius, as if divining them, 'this excessive and
+applauded productiveness, both of your juvenile and your senile,
+in your modern literature, is it ever a crop?  Is it even the restorative
+perishable stuff of the markets?  Is it not rather your street-pavement's
+patter of raindrops, incessantly in motion, and as fruitful?'
+Mr. Semhians appeals to Delphica.  'Genius you have,' says she,
+stiffening his neck-band, 'genius in superabundance':--he throttles to
+the complexion of the peony:--'perhaps criticism is wanting.'  Dr.
+Gannius adds: 'Perhaps it is the drill-sergeant everywhere wanting for an
+unrivalled splendid rabble!'
+
+Colney left the whole body of concurrents on the raised flooring of a
+famous New York Hall, clearly entrapped, and incited to debate before
+an enormous audience, as to the merits of their respective languages.
+'I hear,' says Dr. Bouthoin to Mr. Semhians (whose gape is daily
+extending), 'that the tickets cost ten dollars!'
+
+There was not enough of Delphicafor Nests.
+
+Colney asked: 'Have you seen any of our band?'
+
+'No,' she said, with good cheer, and became thoughtful, conscious of a
+funny reason for the wish to hear of the fictitious creature disliked by
+Dudley.  A funny and a naughty reason, was it?  Not so very naughty: but
+it was funny; for it was a spirit of opposition to Dudley, without an
+inferior feeling at all, such as girls should have.
+
+Colney brought his viola for a duet; they had a pleasant musical evening,
+as in old days at Creckholt; and Nesta, going upstairs with the ladies to
+bed, made them share her father's amused view of the lamb of the flock
+this bitter gentleman became when he had the melodious instrument tucked
+under his chin.  He was a guest for the night.  Dressing in the early
+hour, Nests saw him from her window on the parade, and soon joined him,
+to hear him at his bitterest, in the flush of the brine.  'These lengths
+of blank-faced terraces fronting sea!' were the satirist's present black
+beast.  'So these moneyed English shoulder to the front place; and that
+is the appearance they offer to their commercial God!'  He gazed along
+the miles of 'English countenance,' drearily laughing.  Changeful ocean
+seemed to laugh at the spectacle.  Some Orphic joke inspired his
+exclamation: 'Capital!'
+
+'Come where the shops are,' said Nesta.
+
+'And how many thousand parsons have you here?'
+
+'Ten, I think,' she answered in his vein, and warmed him; leading him
+contemplatively to scrutinize her admirers: the Rev. Septimus; Mr.
+Sowerby.
+
+'News of our friend of the whimpering flute?'
+
+'Here?  no.  I have to understand you!'
+
+Colney cast a weariful look backward on the 'regiments of Anglo-Chinese'
+represented to him by the moneyed terraces, and said: 'The face of a
+stopped watch!--the only meaning it has is past date.'
+
+He had no liking for Dudley Sowerby.  But it might have been an allusion
+to the general view of the houses.  But again, 'the meaning of it past
+date,' stuck in her memory.  A certain face close on handsome, had a
+fatal susceptibility to caricature.
+
+She spoke of her 'exile': wanted Skepsey to come down to her; moaned over
+the loss of her Louise.  The puzzle of the reason for the long separation
+from her parents, was evident in her mind, and unmentioned.
+
+They turned on to the pier.
+
+Nesta reminded him of certain verses he had written to celebrate her
+visit to the place when she was a child:
+
+                  '"And then along the pier we sped,
+                    And there we saw a Whale
+                    He seemed to have a Normous Head,
+                    And not a bit of Tail!"'
+
+'Manifestly a foreigner to our shores, where the exactly inverse
+condition rules,' Colney said.
+
+                  '"And then we scampered on the beach,
+                    To chase the foaming wave;
+                    And when we ran beyond its reach
+                    We all became more brave."'
+
+Colney remarked: 'I was a poet--for once.'
+
+A neat-legged Parisianly-booted lady, having the sea, winds very
+enterprising with her dark wavy, locks and jacket and skirts, gave a cry
+of pleasure and--a silvery 'You dear!' at sight of Nesta; then at sight
+of one of us, moderated her tone to a propriety equalling the most
+conventional.  'We ride to-day?'
+
+'I shall be one,' said Nesta.
+
+'It would not be the commonest pleasure to me, if you were absent.'
+
+'Till eleven, then!'
+
+'After my morning letter to Ned.'
+
+She sprinkled silvery sound on that name or on the adieu, blushed,
+blinked, frowned, sweetened her lip-lines, bit at the underone, and
+passed in a discomposure.
+
+'The lady?' Colney asked.
+
+'She is--I meet her in the troop conducted by the riding-master: Mrs.
+Marsett.'
+
+'And who is Ned?'
+
+'It is her husband, to whom she writes every morning.  He is a captain in
+the army, or was.  He is in Norway, fishing.'
+
+'Then the probability is, that the English officer continues his military
+studies.'
+
+'Do you not think her handsome, Mr. Durance?'
+
+'Ned may boast of his possession, when he has trimmed it and toned it a
+little.!
+
+'She is different, if you are alone with her.'
+
+'It is not unusual,' said Colney.
+
+At eleven o'clock he was in London, and Nesta rode beside Mrs. Marsett
+amid the troop.
+
+A South-easterly wind blew the waters to shifty goldleaf prints of
+brilliance under the sun.
+
+'I took a liberty this morning, I called you "Dear" this morning,' the
+lady said.  'It's what I feel, only I have no right to blurt out
+everything I feel, and I was ashamed.  I am sure I must have appeared
+ridiculous.  I got quite nervous.'
+
+'You would not be ridiculous to me.'
+
+'I remember I spoke of Ned!
+
+'You have spoken of him before.'
+
+'Oh!  I know: to you alone.  I should like to pluck out my heart and
+pitch it on the waves, to see whether it would sink or swim.  That's a
+funny idea, isn't it!  I tell you everything that comes up.  What shall
+I do when I lose you!  You always make me feel you've a lot of poetry
+ready-made in you.'
+
+'We will write.  And you will have your husband then.'
+
+'When I had finished my letter to Ned, I dropped my head on it and
+behaved like a fool for several minutes.  I can't bear the thought of
+losing you!'
+
+'But you don't lose me,' said Nesta; 'there is no ground for your
+supposing that you will.  And your wish not to lose me, binds me to you
+more closely.'
+
+'If you knew!' Mrs. Marsett caught at her slippery tongue, and she
+carolled: 'If we all knew everything, we should be wiser, and what a
+naked lot of people we should be!'
+
+They were crossing the passage of a cavalcade of gentlemen, at the end of
+the East Cliff.  One among them, large and dominant, with a playful voice
+of brass, cried out:
+
+'And how do you do, Mrs. Judith Marsett--ha?  Beautiful morning?'
+
+Mrs. Marsett's figure tightened; she rode stonily erect, looked level
+ahead.  Her woman's red mouth was shut fast on a fighting underlip.
+
+'He did not salute you,' Nesta remarked, to justify her for not having
+responded.
+
+The lady breathed a low thunder: 'Coward!'
+
+'He cannot have intended to insult you,' said Nesta.
+
+'That man knows I will not notice him.  He is a beast.  He will learn
+that I carry a horsewhip.'
+
+'Are you not taking a little incident too much to heart?'
+
+The sigh of the heavily laden came from Mrs. Marsett.
+
+'Am I pale?  I dare say.  I shall go on my knees tonight hating myself
+that I was born "one of the frail sex."  We are, or we should ride at the
+coward and strike him to the ground.  Pray, pray do not look distressed!
+Now you know my Christian name.  That dog of a man barks it out on the
+roads.  It doesn't matter.'
+
+'He has offended you before?'
+
+'You are near me.  They can't hurt me, can't touch me, when I think that
+I 'm talking with you.  How I envy those who call you by your Christian
+name!'
+
+'Nesta,' said smiling Nesta.  The smile was forced, that she might show
+kindness, for the lady was jarring on her.
+
+Mrs. Marsett opened her lips: 'Oh, my God, I shall be crying!--let's
+gallop.  No, wait, I'll tell you.  I wish I could!  I will tell you of
+that man.  That man is Major Worrell.  One of the majors who manage to
+get to their grade.  A retired warrior.  He married a handsome woman,
+above him in rank, with money; a good woman.  She was a good woman, or
+she would have had her vengeance, and there was never a word against her.
+She must have loved that--Ned calls him, full-blooded ox.  He spent her
+money and he deceived her.--You innocent!  Oh, you dear!  I'd give the
+world to have your eyes.  I've heard tell of "crystal clear," but eyes
+like yours have to tell me how deep and clear.  Such a world for them to
+be in!  I did pray, and used your name last night on my knees, that you
+--I said Nesta--might never have to go through other women's miseries.
+Ah me!  I have to tell you he deceived her.  You don't quite understand.'
+
+'I do understand,' said Nesta.
+
+'God help you!--I am excited to-day.  That man is poison to me.  His wife
+forgave him three times.  On three occasions, that unhappy woman forgave
+him.  He is great at his oaths, and a big breaker of them.  She walked
+out one November afternoon and met him riding along with a notorious
+creature.  You know there are bad women.  They passed her, laughing.  And
+look there, Nesta, see that groyne; that very one.'  Mrs. Marsett pointed
+her whip hard out.  'The poor lady went down from the height here; she
+walked into that rough water look!--steadying herself along it, and she
+plunged; she never came out alive.  A week after her burial, Major
+Worrell--I 've told you enough.'
+
+'We 'll gallop now,' said Nesta.
+
+Mrs. Marsett's talk, her presence hardly less, affected the girl with
+those intimations of tumult shown upon smooth waters when the great
+elements are conspiring.  She felt that there was a cause why she had to
+pity, did pity her.  It might be, that Captain Marsett wedded one who was
+of inferior station,' and his wife had to bear blows from cruel people.
+The supposition seemed probable.  The girl accepted it; for beyond it, as
+the gathering of the gale masked by hills, lay a brewing silence.  What?
+She did not reflect.  Her quick physical sensibility curled to some
+breath of heated atmosphere brought about her by this new acquaintance:
+not pleasant, if she had thought of pleasure: intensely suggestive of our
+life at the consuming tragic core, round which the furnace pants.  But
+she was unreflecting, feeling only a beyond and hidden.
+
+Besides, she was an exile.  Spelling at dark things in the dark, getting
+to have the sight which peruses darkness, she touched the door of a
+mystery that denied her its key, but showed the lock; and her life was
+beginning to know of hours that fretted her to recklessness.  Her friend
+Louise was absent: she had so few friends--owing to that unsolved reason:
+she wanted one, of any kind, if only gentle: and this lady seemed to need
+her: and she flattered; Nesta was in the mood for swallowing and
+digesting and making sweet blood of flattery.
+
+At one time, she liked Mrs. Marsett best absent: in musing on her,
+wishing her well, having said the adieu.  For it was wearisome to hear
+praises of 'innocence'; and women can do so little to cure that
+'wickedness of men,' among the lady's conversational themes;  and 'love'
+too: it may be a 'plague,' and it may be 'heaven': it is better left
+unspoken of.  But there were times when Mrs. Marsett's looks and tones
+touched compassion to press her hand: an act that had a pledgeing
+signification in the girl's bosom: and when, by the simple avoidance of
+ejaculatory fervours, Mrs. Marsett's quieted good looks had a shadow of a
+tender charm, more pathetic than her outcries were.
+
+These had not always the sanction of polite usage: and her English was
+guilty of sudden lapses to the Thameswater English of commerce and
+drainage instead of the upper wells.  But there are many uneducated
+ladies in the land.  Many, too, whose tastes in romantic literature
+betray now and then by peeps a similarity to Nesta's maid Mary's.  Mrs.
+Marsett liked love, blood, and adventure.  She had, moreover, a favourite
+noble poet, and she begged Nesta's pardon for naming him, and she would
+not name him, and told her she must not read him until she was a married
+woman, because he did mischief to girls.  Thereupon she fell into one of
+her silences, emerging with a cry of hate of herself for having ever read
+him.  She did not blame the bard.  And, ah, poor bard!  he fought his
+battle: he shall not be named for the brand on the name.  He has lit a
+sulphur match for the lover of nature through many a generation; and to
+be forgiven by sad frail souls who could accuse him of pipeing devil's
+agent to them at the perilous instant--poor girls too!--is chastisement
+enough.  This it is to be the author of unholy sweets: a Posterity
+sitting in judgement will grant, that they were part of his honest battle
+with the hypocrite English Philistine, without being dupe of the plea or
+at all the thirsty swallower of his sugary brandy.  Mrs. Marsett
+expressed aloud her gladness of escape in never having met a man like
+him; followed by her regret that 'Ned' was so utterly unlike; except
+'perhaps'--and she hummed; she was off on the fraternity in wickedness.
+
+Nesta's ears were fatigued.  'My mother writes of you,' she said, to vary
+the subject.
+
+Mrs. Marsett looked.  She sighed downright: 'I have had my dream of a
+friend!--It was that gentleman with you on the pier!  Your mother
+objects?'
+
+'She has inquired, nothing more.'
+
+'I am not twenty-three: not as old as I should be, for a guide to you.
+I know I would never do you harm.  That I know.  I would walk into that
+water first, and take Mrs. Worrell's plunge:--the last bath; a thorough
+cleanser for a woman!  Only, she was a good woman and didn't want it, as
+we--as lots of us do:--to wash off all recollection of having met a man!
+Your mother would not like me to call you Nesta!  I have never begged you
+to call me Judith.  Damnable name!'  Mrs. Marsett revelled in the heat of
+the curse on it, as a relief to torture of the breast, until a sense of
+the girl's alarmed hearing sent the word reverberating along her nerves
+and shocked her with such an exposure of our Shaggy wild one on a lady's
+lips.  She murmured: 'Forgive me,' and had the passion to repeat the
+epithet in shrieks, and scratch up male speech for a hatefuller; but the
+twitch of Nesta's brows made her say: 'Do pardon me.  I did something in
+Scripture.  Judith could again.  Since that brute Worrell crossed me
+riding with you, I loathe my name; I want to do things.  I have offended
+you.'
+
+'We have been taught differently.  I do not use those words.  Nothing
+else.'
+
+'They frighten you.'
+
+'They make me shut; that is all.'
+
+'Supposing you were some day to discover .  .  .  ta-tata, all the things
+there are in the world.'  Mrs. Marsett let fly an artificial chirrup.
+'You must have some ideas of me.'
+
+'I think you have had unhappy experiences.'
+
+'Nesta .  .  .  just now and then!  the first time we rode out together,
+coming back from the downs, I remember, I spoke, without thinking--I was
+enraged--of a case in the newspapers; and you had seen it, and you were
+not afraid to talk of it.  I remember I thought, Well, for a girl, she's
+bold!  I thought you knew more than a girl ought to know: until--you did
+--you set my heart going.  You spoke of the poor women like an angel of
+compassion.  You said, we were all mixed up with their fate--I forget the
+words.  But no one ever heard in Church anything that touched me so.
+I worshipped you.  You said, you thought of them often, and longed to
+find out what you could do to help.  And I thought, if they could hear
+you, and only come near you, as I was--ah, my heaven!  Unhappy
+experiences?  Yes.  But when men get women on the slope to their
+perdition, they have no mercy, none.  They deceive, and they lie; they
+are false in acts and words; they do as much as murder.  They're never
+hanged for it.  They make the Laws!  And then they become fathers of
+families, and point the finger at the "wretched creatures."  They have a
+dozen names against women, for one at themselves.'
+
+'It maddens me at times to think .  .  .  !' said Nesta, burning with the
+sting of vile names.
+
+Oh, there are bad women as well as bad men: but men have the power and
+the lead, and they take advantage of it; and then they turn round and
+execrate us for not having what they have robbed us of!'
+
+'I blame women--if I may dare, at my age,' said Nesta, and her bosom
+heaved.  'Women should feel for their sex; they should not allow the
+names; they should go among their unhappier sisters.  At the worst, they
+are sisters!  I am sure, that fallen cannot mean--Christ shows it does
+not.  He changes the tone of Scripture.  The women who are made outcasts,
+must be hopeless and go to utter ruin.  We should, if we pretend to be
+better, step between them and that.  There cannot be any goodness unless
+it is a practiced goodness.  Otherwise it is nothing more than paint on
+canvas.  You speak to me of my innocence.  What is it worth, if it is
+only a picture and does no work to help to rescue?  I fear I think most
+of the dreadful names that redden and sicken us.--The Old Testament!--
+I have a French friend, a Mademoiselle Louise de Seines--you should hear
+her: she is intensely French, and a Roman Catholic, everything which we
+are not: but so human, so wise, and so full of the pride of her sex!
+I love her.  It is love.  She will never marry until she meets a man who
+has the respect for women, for all women.  We both think we cannot
+separate ourselves from our sisters.  She seems to me to wither men, when
+she speaks of their injustice, their snares to mislead and their cruelty
+when they have succeeded.  She is right, it is the--brute: there is no
+other word.'
+
+'And French and good!' Mrs. Marsett ejaculated.  'My Ned reads French
+novels, and he says, their women .  .  .  .  But your mademoiselle is a
+real one.  If she says all that, I could kneel to her, French or not.
+Does she talk much about men and women?'
+
+'Not often: we lose our tempers.  She wants women to have professions;
+at present they have not much choice to avoid being penniless.  Poverty,
+and the sight of luxury!  It seems as if we produced the situation,
+to create an envious thirst, and cause the misery.  Things are improving
+for them; but we groan at the slowness of it.'
+
+Mrs. Marsett now declared a belief, that women were nearly quite as bad
+as men.  'I don't think I could take up with a profession.  Unless to be
+a singer.  Ah!  Do you sing?'
+
+Nesta smiled: 'Yes, I sing.'
+
+'How I should like to hear you!  My Ned's a thorough Englishman--
+gentleman, you know: he cares only for sport; Shooting, Fishing, Hunting;
+and Football, Cricket, Rowing, and matches.  He's immensely proud of
+England in those things.  And such muscle he has! though he begins to
+fancy his heart's rather weak.  It's digestion, I tell him.  But he takes
+me to the Opera sometimes--Italian Opera; he can't stand German.  Down at
+his place in Leicestershire, he tells me, when there 's company, he has--
+I'm sure you sing beautifully.  When I hear beautiful singing, even from
+a woman they tell tales of, upon my word, it's true, I feel my sins all
+melting out of me and I'm new-made: I can't bear Ned to speak.  Would you
+one day, one afternoon, before the end of next week?--it would do me such
+real good, you can't guess how much; if I could persuade you!  I know I'm
+asking something out of rules.  For just half an hour: I judge by your
+voice in talking.  Oh! it would do me good-good-good to hear you sing.
+There is a tuned piano--a cottage; I don't think it sounds badly.  You
+would not see any great harm in calling on me? once!'
+
+'No,' said Nesta.  And it was her nature that projected the word.  Her
+awakened wits were travelling to her from a distance, and she had an
+intimation of their tidings; and she could not have said what they were;
+or why, for a moment, she hesitated to promise she would come.  Her
+vision of the reality of things was without written titles, to put
+the stamp of the world on it.  She felt this lady to be one encompassed
+and in the hug of the elementary forces, which are the terrors to
+inexperienced pure young women.  But she looked at her, and dared trust
+those lips, those eyes.  She saw, through whatever might be the vessel,
+the spirit of the woman; as the upper nobility of our brood are enabled
+to do in a crisis mixed of moral aversion and sisterly sympathy, when
+nature cries to them, and the scales of convention, the mud-spots of
+accident, even naughtiness, even wickedness, all misfortune's issue, if
+we but see the one look upward, fall away.  Reason is not excluded from
+these blind throbs of a blood that strikes to right the doings of the
+Fates.  Nesta did not err in her divination of the good and the bad
+incarnate beside her, though both good and bad were behind a curtain; the
+latter sparing her delicate senses, appealing to chivalry, to the simply
+feminine claim on her.  Reason, acting in her heart as a tongue of the
+flames of the forge where we all are wrought, told her surely that the
+good predominated.  She had the heart which is at our primal fires when
+nature speaks.
+
+She gave the promise to call on Mrs. Marsett and sing to her.
+
+'An afternoon?  Oh! what afternoon?' she was asked, and she said: 'This
+afternoon, if you like.'
+
+So it was agreed: Mrs. Marsett acted violently the thrill of delight she
+felt in the prospect.
+
+The ladies Dorothea and Virginia, consulted, and pronounced the name of
+Marsett to be a reputable County name.  'There was a Leicestershire
+baronet of the name of Marsett.'  They arranged to send their button-
+blazing boy at Nesta's heels.  Mrs. Marsett resided in a side-street not
+very distant from the featureless but washed and orderly terrace of the
+glassy stare at sea.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+SHOWS ONE OF THE SHADOWS OF THE WORLD CROSSING A VIRGIN'S MIND
+
+Nasta and her maid were brought back safely through the dusk by their
+constellation of a boy, to whom the provident ladies had entrusted her.
+They could not but note how short her syllables were.  Her face was only
+partly seen.  They had returned refreshed from their drive on the
+populous and orderly parade---so fair a pattern of their England!--after
+discoursing of 'the dear child,' approving her manners, instancing proofs
+of her intelligence, nay, her possession of 'character.'  They did so,
+notwithstanding that these admissions were worse than their growing love
+for the girl, to confound established ideas.  And now, in thoughtfulness
+on her behalf, Dorothea said, 'We have considered, Nesta, that you may
+be lonely; and if it is your wish, we will leave our card on your new
+acquaintance.'  Nesta took her hand and kissed it; she declined, saying,
+'No,' without voice.
+
+They had two surprises at the dinner-hour.  One was the card of Dartrey
+Fenellan, naming an early time next day for his visit; and the other was
+the appearance of the Rev. Stuart Rem, a welcome guest.  He had come to
+meet his Bishop.
+
+He had come also with serious information for the ladies, regarding the
+Rev. Abram Posterley.  No sooner was this out of his mouth than both
+ladies exclaimed:
+
+'Again!' So serious was it, that there had been a consultation at the
+Wells; Mr. Posterley's friend, the Rev. Septimus Barmby, and his own
+friend, the Rev. Groseman Buttermore, had journeyed from London to sit
+upon the case: and, 'One hoped,' Mr. Stuart Rem said, 'poor Posterley
+would be restored to the senses he periodically abandoned.'  He laid a
+hand on Tasso's curls, and withdrew it at a menace of teeth.  Tasso would
+submit to rough caresses from Mr. Posterley; he would not allow Mr.
+Stuart Rem to touch him.  Why was that?  Perhaps for the reason of Mr.
+Posterley's being so emotional as perpetually to fall a victim to some
+bright glance and require the rescue of his friends; the slave of woman
+had a magnet for animals!
+
+Dorothea and Virginia were drawn to compassionate sentiments, in spite
+of the provokeing recurrence of Mr. Posterley's malady.  He had not an
+income to support a wife.  Always was this unfortunate gentleman
+entangling himself in a passion for maid or widow of the Wells and it was
+desperate, a fever.  Mr. Stuart Rem charitably remarked on his taking it
+so severely because of his very scrupulous good conduct.  They pardoned a
+little wound to their delicacy, and asked: 'On this occasion?' Mr. Stuart
+Rem named a linendraper's establishment near the pantiles, where a fair
+young woman served.  'And her reputation?' That was an article less
+presentable through plate-glass, it seemed: Mr. Stuart Rem drew a
+prolonged breath into his nose.
+
+'It is most melancholy!' they said in unison.  'Nothing positive,' said
+he.  'But the suspicion of a shadow, Mr. Stuart Rem!  You will not permit
+it?' He stated, that his friend Buttermore might have influence.
+Dorothea said: 'When I think of Mr. Posterley's addiction to ceremonial
+observances, and to matrimony, I cannot but think of a sentence that fell
+from Mr. Durance one day, with reference to that division of our Church:
+he called it:--you frown!  and I would only quote Mr. Durance to you in
+support of your purer form, as we hold it to be--with the candles, the
+vestments, Confession, alas!  he called it, "Rome and a wife."'
+
+Mr. Stuart Rem nodded an enforced assent: he testily dismissed mention of
+Mr. Durance, and resumed on Mr. Posterley.
+
+The good ladies now, with some of their curiosity appeased, considerately
+signified to him, that a young maiden was present.
+
+The young maiden had in heart stuff to render such small gossip a hum of
+summer midges.  She did not imagine the dialogue concerned her in any
+way.  She noticed Mr. Stuart Rem's attentive scrutiny of her from time to
+time.  She had no sensitiveness, hardly a mind for things about her.
+To-morrow she was to see Captain Dartrey.  She dwelt on that prospect,
+for an escape from the meshes of a painful hour--the most woeful of the
+hours she had yet known-passed with Judith Marsett: which dragged her
+soul through a weltering of the deeps, tossed her over and over, still
+did it with her ideas.  It shocked her nevertheless to perceive how much
+of the world's flayed life and harsh anatomy she had apprehended, and so
+coldly, previous to Mrs. Marsett's lift of the veil in her story of
+herself: a skipping revelation, terrible enough to the girl; whose
+comparison of the previously suspected things with the things now
+revealed imposed the thought of her having been both a precocious and a
+callous young woman: a kind of 'Delphica without the erudition,' her mind
+phrased it airily over her chagrin.--And the silence of Dudley proved him
+to have discovered his error in choosing such a person--he was wise, and
+she thanked him.  She had an envy of the ignorant-innocents adored by the
+young man she cordially thanked for quitting her.  She admired the white
+coat of armour they wore, whether bestowed on them by their constitution
+or by prudence.  For while combating mankind now on Judith Marsett's
+behalf, personally she ran like a hare from the mere breath of an
+association with the very minor sort of similar charges; ardently she
+desired the esteem of mankind; she was at moments abject.  But had she
+actually been aware of the facts now known?
+
+Those wits of the virgin young, quickened to shrewdness by their budding
+senses--and however vividly--require enlightenment of the audible and
+visible before their sterner feelings can be heated to break them away
+from a blushful dread and force the mind to know.  As much as the
+wilfully or naturally blunted, the intelligently honest have to learn by
+touch: only, their understandings cannot meanwhile be so wholly obtuse as
+our society's matron, acting to please the tastes of the civilized man--
+a creature that is not clean-washed of the Turk in him--barbarously
+exacts.  The signor aforesaid is puzzled to read the woman, who is after
+all in his language; but when it comes to reading the maiden, she appears
+as a phosphorescent hieroglyph to some speculative Egyptologer; and he
+insists upon distinct lines and characters; no variations, if he is to
+have sense of surety.  Many a young girl is misread by the amount she
+seems to know of our construction, history, and dealings, when it is not
+more than her sincere ripeness of nature, that has gathered the facts of
+life profuse about her, and prompts her through one or other of the
+instincts, often vanity, to show them to be not entirely strange to her;
+or haply her filly nature is having a fling at the social harness of
+hypocrisy.  If you (it is usually through the length of ears of your
+Novelist that the privilege is yours) have overheard queer communications
+passing between girls, and you must act the traitor eavesdropper or
+Achilles masquerader to overhear so clearly, these, be assured, are not
+specially the signs of their corruptness.  Even the exceptionally cynical
+are chiefly to be accused of bad manners.  Your Moralist is a myopic
+preacher, when he stamps infamy, on them, or on our later generation, for
+the kick they have at grandmother decorum, because you do not or cannot
+conceal from them the grinning skeleton behind it.
+
+Nesta once had dreams of her being loved: and she was to love in return
+for a love that excused her for loving double, treble; as not her lover
+could love, she thought with grateful pride in the treasure she was to
+pour out at his feet; as only one or two (and they were women) in the
+world had ever loved.  Her notion of the passion was parasitic: man the
+tree, woman the bine: but the bine was flame to enwind and to soar,
+serpent to defend, immortal flowers to crown.  The choice her parents had
+made for her in Dudley, behind the mystery she had scent of, nipped her
+dream, and prepared her to meet, as it were, the fireside of a November
+day instead of springing up and into the dawn's blue of full summer with
+swallows on wing.  Her station in exile at the Wells of the weariful
+rich, under the weight of the sullen secret, unenlivened by Dudley's
+courtship, subdued her to the world's decrees; phrased thus: 'I am not to
+be a heroine.'  The one golden edge to the view was, that she would
+greatly please her father.
+
+Her dream of a love was put away like a botanist's pressed weed.  But
+after hearing Judith Marsett's wild sobs, it had no place in her
+cherishing.  For, above all, the unhappy woman protested love to have
+been the cause of her misery.  She moaned of 'her Ned'; of his goodness,
+his deceitfulness, her trustfulness; his pride and the vileness of his
+friends; her longsuffering and her break down of patience.  It was done
+for the proof of her unworthiness of Nesta's friendship: that she might
+be renounced, and embraced.  She told the pathetic half of her story, to
+suit the gentle ear, whose critical keenness was lost in compassion.  How
+deep the compassion, mixed with the girl's native respect for the evil-
+fortuned, may be judged by her inaccessibility to a vulgar tang that she
+was aware of in the deluge of the torrent, where Innocence and Ned and
+Love and a proud Family and that beast Worrell rolled together in leaping
+and shifting involutions.
+
+A darkness of thunder was on the girl.  Although she was not one to
+shrink beneath it like the small bird of the woods, she had to say within
+herself many times, 'I shall see Captain Dartrey to-morrow,' for a
+recovery and a nerving.  And with her thought of him, her tooth was at
+her underlip, she struggled abashed, in hesitation over men's views of
+her sex, and how to bring a frank mind to meet him; to be sure of his not
+at heart despising; until his character swam defined and bright across
+her scope.  'He is good to women.'  Fragments of conversation,
+principally her father's, had pictured Captain Dartrey to her most
+manfully tolerant toward a frivolous wife.
+
+He came early in the morning, instantly after breakfast.
+
+Not two minutes had passed before she was at home with him.  His words,
+his looks, revived her spirit of romance, gave her the very landscapes,
+and new ones.  Yes, he was her hero.  But his manner made him also an
+adored big brother, stamped splendid by the perils of life.  He sat
+square, as if alert to rise, with an elbow on a knee, and the readiest
+turn of head to speakers, the promptest of answers, eyes that were a
+brighter accent to the mouth, so vividly did look accompany tone.  He
+rallied her, chatted and laughed; pleased the ladies by laughing at
+Colney Durance, and inspired her with happiness when he spoke of
+England:--that 'One has to be in exile awhile, to see the place she
+takes.'
+
+'Oh, Captain Dartrey, I do like to hear you say so,' she cried; his voice
+was reassuring also in other directions: it rang of true man.
+
+He volunteered, however, a sad admission, that England had certainly lost
+something of the great nation's proper conception of Force: the meaning
+of it, virtue of it, and need for it.  'She bleats for a lesson, and will
+get her lesson.'
+
+But if we have Captain Dartrey, we shall come through!  So said the
+sparkle of Nesta's eyes.
+
+'She is very like her father,' he said to the ladies.
+
+'We think so,' they remarked.
+
+'There's the mother too,' said he; and Nesta saw that the ladies
+shadowed.
+
+They retired.  Then she begged him to 'tell her of her own dear mother.'
+The news gave comfort, except for the suspicion, that the dear mother was
+being worn by her entertaining so largely.  'Papa is to blame,' said
+Nesta.
+
+'A momentary strain.  Your father has an idea of Parliament; one of the
+London Boroughs.'
+
+'And I, Captain Dartrey, when do I go back to them?'
+
+'Your mother comes down to consult with you.  And now, do we ride
+together?'
+
+'You are free?'
+
+'My uncle, Lord Clan, lets me out.'
+
+'To-day?'
+
+'Why, yes!'
+
+'This morning?'
+
+'In an hour's time.'
+
+'I will be ready.'
+
+Nesta sent a line of excuse to Mrs. Marsett, throwing in a fervent
+adjective for balm.
+
+That fair person rode out with the troop under conduct of the hallowing
+squire of the stables, and passed by Nesta on horseback beside Dartrey
+Fenellan at the steps of a huge hotel; issuing from which, pretty Mrs.
+Blathenoy was about to mount.  Mrs. Marsett looked ahead and coloured,
+but she could not restrain one look at Nesta, that embraced her cavalier.
+Nesta waved hand to her, and nodded.  Mrs. Marsett withdrew her eyes; her
+doing so, silent though it was, resembled the drag back to sea of the
+shingle-wave below her, such a screaming of tattle she heard in the
+questions discernible through the attitude of the cavalier and of the
+lady, who paused to stare, before the leap up in the saddle.  'Who is
+she?--what is she?--how did you know her?--where does she come from?--
+wears her hat on her brows!--huge gauntlets out of style!--shady! shady!
+shady!'  And as always during her nervous tumults, the name of Worrell
+made diapason of that execrable uproar.  Her hat on her brows had an air
+of dash, defying a world it could win, as Ned well knew.  But she scanned
+her gauntlets disapprovingly.  This town, we are glad to think, has a
+bright repute for glove-shops.  And Mrs. Marsett could applaud herself
+for sparing Ned's money; she had mended her gloves, if they were in the
+fashion.--But how does the money come?  Hark at that lady and that
+gentleman questioning Miss Radnor of everything, everything in the world
+about her!  Not a word do they get from Miss Radnor.  And it makes them
+the more inquisitive.  Idle rich people, comfortably fenced round, are so
+inquisitive!  And Mrs. Marsett, loving Nesta for the notice of her,
+maddened by the sting of tongues it was causing, heard the wash of the
+beach, without consciousness of analogies, but with a body ready to jump
+out of skin, out of life, in desperation at the sound.
+
+She was all impulse; a shifty piece of unmercenary stratagem occasionally
+directing it.  Arrived at her lodgings, she wrote to Nesta: 'I entreat
+you not to notice me, if you pass me on the road again.  Let me drop,
+never mind how low I go.  I was born to be wretched.  A line from you,
+just a line now and then, only to show me I am not forgotten.  I have had
+a beautiful dream.  I am not bad in reality; I love goodness, I know.
+I cling to the thought of you, as my rescue, I declare.  Please, let me
+hear: if it's not more than "good day" and your initials on a post-card.'
+
+The letter brought Nesta in person to her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+THE BURDEN UPON NESTA
+
+Could there be confidences on the subject of Mrs. Marsett with Captain
+Dartrey?--Nesta timidly questioned her heart: she knocked at an iron door
+shut upon a thing alive.  The very asking froze her, almost to stopping
+her throbs of pity for the woman.  With Captain Dartrey, if with any one;
+but with no one.  Not with her mother even.  Toward her mother, she felt
+guilty of knowing.  Her mother had a horror of that curtain.  Nesta had
+seen it, and had taken her impressions; she, too, shrank from it; the
+more when impelled to draw near it.  Louise de Seilles would have been
+another self; Louise was away; when to return, the dear friend could not
+state.  Speaking in her ear, would have been possible; the theme
+precluded writing.
+
+It was ponderous combustible new knowledge of life for a girl to hold
+unaided.  In the presence of the simple silvery ladies Dorothea and
+Virginia, she had qualms, as if she were breaking out in spots before
+them.  The ladies fancied, that Mr. Stuart Rem had hinted to them oddly
+of the girl; and that he might have meant, she appeared a little too
+cognizant of poor Mr. Abram Posterley's malady--as girls in these
+terrible days, only too frequently, too brazenly, are.  They discoursed
+to her of the degeneracy of the manners, nay, the morals of young
+Englishwomen, once patterns!  They sketched the young English gentlewoman
+of their time; indeed a beauty; with round red cheeks, and rounded open
+eyes, and a demure shut mouth, a puppet's divine ignorance; inoffensive
+in the highest degree, rightly worshipped.  They were earnest, and Nesta
+struck at herself.  She wished to be as they had been, reserving her
+painful independence.
+
+They were good: they were the ideal women of our country; which demands
+if it be but the semblance of the sureness of stationary excellence;
+such as we have in Sevres and Dresden, polished bright and smooth as
+ever by the morning's flick of a duster; perhaps in danger of accidents--
+accidents must be kept away; but enviable, admirable, we think, when we
+are not thinking of seed sown or help given to the generations to follow.
+Nesta both envied and admired; she revered them; yet her sharp
+intelligence, larger in the extended boundary of thought coming of
+strange crimson-lighted new knowledge, discerned in a dimness what blest
+conditions had fixed them on their beautiful barren eminence.  Without
+challengeing it, she had a rebellious rush of sympathy for our evil-
+fortuned of the world; the creatures in the battle, the wounded, trodden,
+mud-stained: and it alarmed her lest she should be at heart one out of
+the fold.
+
+She had the sympathy, nevertheless, and renewing and increasing with the
+pulsations of a compassion that she took for her reflective survey.  The
+next time she saw Dartrey Fenellan, she was assured of him, as being the
+man who might be spoken to; and by a woman: though not by a girl; not
+spoken to by her.  The throb of the impulse precipitating speech subsided
+to a dumb yearning.  He noticed her look: he was unaware of the human sun
+in the girl's eyes taking an image of him for permanent habitation in her
+breast.  That face of his, so clearly lined, quick, firm, with the blue
+smile on it like the gleam of a sword coming out of sheath, did not mean
+hardness, she could have vowed.  O that some woman, other than the
+unhappy woman herself, would speak the words denied to a girl!  He was
+the man who would hearken and help.  Essential immediate help was to be
+given besides the noble benevolence of mind.  Novel ideas of manliness
+and the world's need for it were printed on her understanding.  For what
+could women do in aid of a good cause!  She fawned: she deemed herself
+very despicably her hero's inferior.  The thought of him enclosed her.
+In a prison, the gaoler is a demi-God-hued bright or black, as it may be;
+and, by the present arrangement between the sexes, she, whom the world
+allowed not to have an intimation from eye or ear, or from nature's
+blood-ripeness in commune with them, of certain matters, which it suffers
+to be notorious, necessarily directed her appeal almost in worship to the
+man, who was the one man endowed to relieve, and who locked her mouth for
+shame.
+
+Thus was she, too, being put into her woman's harness of the bit and the
+blinkers, and taught to know herself for the weak thing, the gentle
+parasite, which the fiction of our civilization expects her, caressingly
+and contemptuously, to become in the active, while it is exacted of hero
+Comedy of Clowns!--that in the passive she be a rockfortress impregnable,
+not to speak of magically encircled.  She must also have her feelings;
+she must not be an unnatural creature.  And she must have a sufficient
+intelligence; for her stupidity does not flatter the possessing man.  It
+is not an organic growth that he desires in his mate, but a happy
+composition.  You see the world which comes of the pair.
+
+This burning Nesta, Victor's daughter, tempered by Nataly's milder blood,
+was a girl in whom the hard shocks of the knowledge of life, perforce of
+the hardness upon pure metal, left a strengthening for generous
+imagination.  She did not sit to brood on her injured senses or set them
+through speculation touching heat; they were taken up and consumed by the
+fire of her mind.  Nor had she leisure for the abhorrences, in a heart
+all flowing to give aid, and uplift and restore.  Self was as urgent in
+her as in most of the young; but the gift of humour, which had previously
+diverted it, was now the quick feeling for her sisterhood, through the
+one piteous example she knew; and broadening it, through her insurgent
+abasement on their behalf, which was her scourged pride of sex.  She but
+faintly thought of blaming the men whom her soul besought for justice,
+for common kindness, to women.  There was the danger, that her aroused
+young ignorance would charge the whole of the misery about and abroad
+upon the stronger of those two: and another danger, that the vision of
+the facts below the surface would discolour and disorder her views of
+existence.  But she loved, she sprang to, the lighted world; and she had
+figures of male friends, to which to cling; and they helped in animating
+glorious historical figures on the world's library-shelves or under yet
+palpitating earth.  Promise of a steady balance of her nature, too, was
+shown in the absence of any irritable urgency to be doing, when her bosom
+bled to help.  Beyond the resolve, that she would not abandon the woman
+who had made confession to her, she formed no conscious resolutions.  Far
+ahead down her journey of the years to come, she did see muffled things
+she might hope and would strive to do.  They were chrysalis shapes.
+Above all, she flew her blind quickened heart on the wings of an
+imaginative force; and those of the young who can do that, are in their
+blood incorruptible by dark knowledge, irradiated under darkness in the
+mind.  Let but the throb be kept for others.  That is the one secret, for
+redemption; if not for preservation.
+
+Victor descended on his marine London to embrace his girl, full of
+regrets at Fredi's absence from the great whirl 'overhead,' as places of
+multitudinous assembly, where he shone, always appeared to him.  But it
+was not to last long; she would soon be on the surface again!  At the
+first clasp of her, he chirped some bars of her song.  He challenged her
+to duet before the good ladies, and she kindled, she was caught up by his
+gaiety, wondering at herself; faintly aware of her not being spontaneous.
+And she made her father laugh, just in the old way; and looked at herself
+in his laughter, with the thought, that she could not have become so
+changed; by which the girl was helped to jump to her humour.  Victor
+turned his full front to Dorothea and Virginia, one sunny beam of delight
+and although it was Mr. Stuart Rem who was naughty Nesta's victim, and
+although it seemed a trespass on her part to speak in such a manner of a
+clerical gentleman, they were seized; they were the opposite partners of
+a laughing quadrille, lasting till they were tired out.
+
+Victor had asked his girl, if she sang on a Sunday.  The ladies
+remembered, that she had put the question for permission to Mr. Stuart
+Rem, who was opposed to secular singing.
+
+'And what did he say?' said Victor.
+
+Nesta shook her head: 'It was not what he said, papa; it was his look.
+His duty compelled him, though he loves music.  He had the look of a
+Patriarch putting his handmaiden away into the desert.'
+
+Dorothea and Virginia, in spite of protests within, laughed to streams.
+They recollected the look; she had given the portrait of Mr. Stuart Rem
+in the act of repudiating secular song.
+
+'Victor conjured up a day when this darling Fredi, a child, stood before
+a famous picture in the Brera, at Milan; when he and her mother noticed
+the child's very studious graveness; and they had talked of it; he
+remarking, that she disapproved of the Patriarch; and Nataly, that she
+was taken with Hagar's face.
+
+He seemed surprised at her not having heard from Dudley.
+
+'How is that?' said he.
+
+'Most probably because he has not written, papa.'
+
+He paused after the cool reply.  She had no mournful gaze at all;
+but in the depths of the clear eyes he knew so well, there was a coil
+of something animate, whatever it might be.  And twice she drew a heavy
+breath.
+
+He mentioned it in London.  Nataly telegraphed at night for her girl to
+meet her next day at Dartrey's hotel.
+
+Their meeting was incomprehensibly joyless to the hearts of each,
+though it was desired, and had long been desired, and mother was mother,
+daughter daughter, without diminution of love between them.  They held
+hands, they kissed and clasped, they showered their tender phrases with
+full warm truth, and looked into eyes and surely saw one another.  But
+the heart of each was in a battle of its own, taking wounds or crying for
+supports.  Whether to speak to her girl at once, despite the now vehement
+contrary counsel of Victor, was Nataly's deliberation, under the thought
+of the young creature's perplexity in not seeing her at the house of the
+Duvidney ladies: while Nesta conjured in a flash the past impressions of
+her mother's shrinking distaste from any such hectic themes as this which
+burdened and absorbed her; and she was almost joining to it, through
+sympathy with any thought or feeling of one in whom she had such pride;
+she had the shudder of revulsion.  Further, Nataly put on, rather
+cravenly an air, of distress, or she half designingly permitted her
+trouble to be seen, by way of affecting her girl's recollection when
+the confession was to come, that Nesta might then understand her to have
+been restrained from speaking, not evasive of her duty.  The look was
+interpreted by Nesta as belonging to the social annoyances dating, in her
+calendar, from Creckholt, apprehensively dreaded at Lakelands.  She
+hinted asking, and her mother nodded; not untruthfully; but she put on a
+briskness after the nod; and a doubt was driven into Nesta's bosom.
+
+Her dear Skepsey was coming down to her for a holiday, she was glad to
+hear.  Of Dudley, there was no word.  Nataly shunned his name, with a
+superstitious dread lest any mention of him should renew pretensions that
+she hoped, and now supposed, were quite withdrawn.  So she had told poor
+Mr. Barmby only yesterday, at his humble request to know.  He had seen
+Dudley on the pantiles, walking with a young lady, he said.  And 'he
+feared,' he said; using, a pardonable commonplace of deceit.  Her
+compassion accounted for the 'fear' which was the wish, and caused her
+not to think it particularly strange, that he should imagine Dudley to
+have quitted the field.  Now that a disengaged Dartrey Fenellan was at
+hand, poor Mr. Barmby could have no chance.
+
+Dartrey came to her room by appointment.  She wanted to see him alone,
+and he informed her, that Mrs. Blathenoy was in the hotel, and would
+certainly receive and amuse Nesta for any length of time.
+
+'I will take her up,' said Nataly, and rose, and she sat immediately,
+and fluttered a hand at her breast.  She laughed: 'Perhaps I'm tired!'
+
+Dartrey took Nesta.
+
+He returned, saying: 'There's a lift in the hotel.  Do the stairs affect
+you at all?'
+
+She fenced his sharp look.  'Laziness, I fancy; age is coming on.  How is
+it Mrs. Blathenoy is here?'
+
+'Well!  how?'  'Foolish curiosity?'  'I think I have made her of service.
+I did not bring the lady here.'  'Of service to whom?'  'Why, to Victor!'
+'Has Victor commissioned you?'  'You can bear to hear it.  Her husband
+knows the story.   He has a grudge .  .  .  commercial reasons.  I fancy
+it is, that Victor stood against his paper at the table of the Bank.
+Blathenoy vowed blow for blow.  But I think the little woman holds him
+in.  She says she does.'  'Victor prompted you?'  'It occurred as it
+occurred.'  'She does it for love of us?--Oh!  I can't trifle.
+Dartrey!'  'Tell me.'  'First, you haven't let me know what you think of
+my Nesta.'  'She's a dear good girl.'  'Not so interesting to you as a
+flighty little woman!'  'She has a speck of some sort on her mind.'
+Nataly spied at Dudley's behaviour, and said: 'That will wear away.  Is
+Mr. Blathenoy much here?'  'As often as he can come, I believe.'  'That
+is .  .  . ?'  'I have seen him twice.'  'His wife remains?' 'Fixed here
+for the season.'  'My friend!'  'No harm, no harm!'  'But-to her!'  'You
+have my word of honour.'  'Yes: and she is doing you a service, at your
+request; you occasionally reward her with thanks; and she sees you are a
+man of honour.  Do you not know women?'
+
+Dartrey blew his pooh-pooh on feminine suspicions.  'There's very little
+left of the Don Amoroso in me.  Women don't worship stone figures.'
+
+'They do: like the sea-birds.  And what do you say to me, Dartrey?--I can
+confess it: I am one of them: I love you.  When last you left England, I
+kissed your hand.  It was because of your manly heart in that stone
+figure.  I kept from crying: you used to scorn us English for the
+"whimpering fits" you said we enjoy and must have in books, if we can't
+get them up for ourselves.  I could have prayed to have you as brother or
+son.  I love my Victor the better for his love of you.  Oh!--poor soul--
+how he is perverted since that building of Lakelands!  He cannot take
+soundings of the things he does.  Formerly he confided in me, in all
+things: now not one;--I am the chief person to deceive.  If only he had
+waited!  We are in a network of intrigues and schemes, every artifice in
+London--tempting one to hate simple worthy people, who naturally have
+their views, and see me an impostor, and tolerate me, fascinated by him:
+--or bribed--it has to be said.  There are ways of bribeing.  I trust he
+may not have in the end to pay too heavily for succeeding.  He seems a
+man pushed by Destiny; not irresponsible, but less responsible than most.
+He is desperately tempted by his never failing.  Whatever he does!  .  .
+it is true!  And it sets me thinking of those who have never had an
+ailment, up to a certain age, when the killing blow comes.  Latterly I
+have seen into him: I never did before.  Had I been stronger, I might
+have saved, or averted .  .  .  .  But, you will say, the stronger woman
+would not have occupied my place.  I must have been blind too.  I did not
+see, that his nature shrinks from the thing it calls up.  He dreads the
+exposure he courts--or has to combat with all his powers.  It has been a
+revelation to me of him life as well.  Nothing stops him.  Now it is
+Parliament--a vacant London Borough.  He counts on a death:
+Ah! terrible! I have it like a snake's bite night and day.'
+
+Nataly concluded: 'There: it has done me some good to speak.  I feel so
+base.'  She breathed heavily.
+
+Dartrey took her hand and bent his lips to it.  'Happy the woman who has
+not more to speak!  How long will Nesta stay here?'
+
+'You will watch over her, Dartrey?  She stays-her father wishes--up to--
+ah!  We can hardly be in such extreme peril.  He has her doctor, her
+lawyer, and her butler--a favourite servant--to check, and influence,
+her: She--you know who it is!--does not, I am now convinced, mean
+persecution.  She was never a mean-minded woman.  Oh! I could wish she
+were.  They say she is going.  Then I am to be made an "honest woman of."
+Victor wants Nesta, now that she is away, to stay until .  .  .  You
+understand.  He feels she is safe from any possible kind of harm with
+those good ladies.  And I feel she is the safer for having you near.
+Otherwise, how I should pray to have you with us!  Daily I have to pass
+through, well, something like the ordeal of the red-hot ploughshares--
+and without the innocence, dear friend!  But it's best that my girl
+should not have to be doing the same; though she would have the
+innocence.  But she writhes under any shadow of a blot.  And for her to
+learn the things that are in the world, through her mother's history!--
+and led to know it by the falling away of friends, or say, acquaintances!
+However ignorant at present, she learns from a mere nothing.  I dread!
+.  .  .  .  In a moment, she is a blaze of light.  There have been
+occurrences.  Only Victor could have overcome them!  I had to think it
+better for my girl, that she was absent.  We are in such a whirl up
+there!  So I work round again to "how long?" and the picture of myself
+counting the breaths of a dying woman.  The other day I was told I was
+envied!'
+
+'Battle, battle, battle; for all of us, in every position!' said Dartrey
+sharply, to clip a softness: 'except when one's attending on an invalid
+uncle.  Then it's peace; rather like extinction.  And I can't be crying
+for the end either.  I bite my moustache and tap foot on the floor, out
+of his hearing; make believe I'm patient.  Now I 'll fetch Nesta.'
+
+Mrs. Blathenoy came down with an arm on Nesta's shoulder.  She held a
+telegram, and said to Nataly
+
+'What can this mean?  It's from my husband; he puts "Jacob": my husband's
+Christian name:--so like my husband, where there's no concealment!
+There--he says:
+
+"Down to-night else pack ready start to-morrow."  Can it signify, affairs
+are bad with my husband in the city?'
+
+It had that signification to Nataly's understanding.  At the same time,
+the pretty little woman's absurd lisping repetition of 'my husband' did
+not seem without design to inflict the wound it caused.
+
+In reality, it was not malicious; it came of the bewitchment of a silly
+tongue by her knowledge of the secret to be controlled: and after
+contrasting her fortunes with Nataly's, on her way downstairs, she had
+comforted herself by saying, that at least she had a husband.  She was
+not aware that she dealt a hurt until she had found a small consolation
+in the indulgence: for Captain Dartrey Fenellan admired this commanding
+figure of a woman, who could not legally say that which the woman he
+admired less, if at all, legally could say.
+
+'I must leave you to interpret,' Nataly remarked.
+
+Mrs. Blathenoy resented her unbefitting queenly style.  For this reason,
+she abstained from an intended leading up to mention of the 'singular-
+looking lady' seen riding with Miss Radnor more than once; and as to
+whom, Miss Radnor (for one gives her the name) had not just now, when
+questioned, spoken very clearly.  So the mother's alarms were not raised.
+
+And really it was a pity, Mrs. Blathenoy said to Dartrey subsequently;
+finding him colder than before Mrs. Radnor's visit; it was a pity,
+because a young woman in Miss Radnor's position should not by any
+possibility be seen in association with a person of commonly doubtful
+appearance.
+
+She was denied the petulant satisfaction of rousing the championship
+bitter to her.  Dartrey would not deliver an opinion on Miss Radnor's
+conduct.  He declined, moreover, to assist in elucidating the telegram by
+'looking here,' and poring over the lines beside a bloomy cheek.  He was
+petulantly whipped on the arm with her glove, and pouted at.  And it was
+then--and then only or chiefly through Nataly's recent allusion--that the
+man of honour had his quakings in view of the quagmire, where he was
+planted on an exceedingly narrow causeway, not of the firmest.  For she
+was a pretty little woman, one of the prize gifts of the present
+education of women to the men who are for having them quiescent domestic
+patterns; and her artificial ingenuousness or candid frivolities came to
+her by nature to kindle the nature of the gentleman on the other bank of
+the stream, and witch him to the plunge, so greatly mutually regretted
+after taken: an old duet to the moon.
+
+Dartrey escaped to the Club, where he had a friend.  The friend was
+Colonel Sudley, one of the modern studious officers, not in good
+esteem with the authorities.  He had not forgiven Dartrey for the
+intemperateness which cut off a brilliant soldier from the service.
+He was reduced to acknowledge, however, that there was a sparkling
+defence for him to reply with, in the shape of a fortune gained and
+where we have a Society forcing us to live up to an expensive level,
+very trying to a soldier's income, a fortune gained will offer excuses
+for misconduct short of disloyal or illegal.  They talked of the state of
+the Army: we are moving.  True, and at the last Review, the 'march past'
+was performed before a mounted generalissimo profoundly asleep, head on
+breast.  Our English military 'moving' may now be likened to Somnolency
+on Horseback.  'Oh, come, no rancour,' said the colonel; 'you know he's a
+kind old boy at heart; nowhere a more affectionate man alive!'
+
+'So the sycophants are sure of posts!'
+
+'Come, I say!  He's devoted to the Service.'
+
+'Invalid him, and he shall have a good epitaph.'
+
+'He's not so responsible as the taxpayer.'
+
+'There you touch home.  Mother Goose can't imagine the need for defence
+until a hand's at her feathers.'
+
+'What about her shrieks now and then?'
+
+'Indigestion of a surfeit?'
+
+They were in a laughing wrangle when two acquaintances of the colonel's
+came near.  One of them recognized Dartrey.  He changed a prickly subject
+to one that is generally as acceptable to the servants of Mars.  His
+companion said: 'Who is the girl out with Judith Marsett?'  He flavoured
+eulogies of the girl's good looks in easy garrison English.  She was
+praised for sitting her horse well.  One had met her on the parade, in
+the afternoon, walking with Mrs. Marsett.  Colonel Sudley had seen them
+on horseback.  He remarked to Dartrey:
+
+'And by the way, you're a clean stretch ahead of us.  I've seen you go by
+these windows, with the young lady on one side, and a rather pretty woman
+on the other too.'
+
+'Nothing is unseen in this town!' Dartrey rejoined.
+
+Strolling to his quarters along the breezy parade at night, he proposed
+to himself, that he would breathe an immediate caution to Nesta.  How had
+she come to know this Mrs. Marsett?  But he was more seriously thinking
+of what Colney Durance called 'The Mustard Plaster'; the satirist's
+phrase for warm relations with a married fair one: and Dartrey, clear of
+any design to have it at his breast, was beginning to take intimations of
+pricks and burns.  They are an almost positive cure of inflammatory
+internal conditions.  They were really hard on him, who had none to be
+cured.
+
+The hour was nigh midnight.  As he entered his hotel, the porter ran off
+to the desk in his box, and brought him a note, saying, that a lady had
+left it at half-past nine.  Left it?--Then the lady could not be the
+alarming lady.  He was relieved.  The words of the letter were
+cabalistic; these, beneath underlined address:
+
+'I beg you to call on me, if I do not see you this evening.  It is
+urgent; you will excuse me when I explain.  Not late to-morrow.  I am
+sure you will not fail to come.  I could write what would be certain to
+bring you.  I dare not trust any names to paper.'
+
+The signature was, Judith Marsett.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+SHOWS HOW THE SQUIRES IN A CONQUEROR'S SERVICE HAVE AT TIMES TO DO
+KNIGHTLY CONQUEST OF THEMSELVES
+
+By the very earliest of the trains shot away to light and briny air from
+London's November gloom, which knows the morning through increase of
+gasjets, little Skepsey was hurried over suburban chimneys, in his
+friendly third-class carriage; where we have reminders of ancient
+pastoral times peculiar to our country, as it may chance; but where a man
+may speak to his neighbour right off without being deemed offensive.
+That is homely.  A social fellow knitting closely to his fellows when he
+meets them, enjoys it, even at the cost of uncushioned seats he can, if
+imps are in him, merryandrew as much as he pleases; detested punctilio
+does not reign there; he can proselytize for the soul's welfare; decry
+or uphold the national drink; advertize a commercial Firm deriving
+prosperity from the favour of the multitude; exhort to patriotism.  All
+is accepted.  Politeness is the rule, according to Skepsey's experience
+of the Southern part of the third-class kingdom.  And it is as well to
+mark the divisions, for the better knowledge of our countrymen.  The
+North requires volumes to itself.
+
+The hard-grained old pirate-stock Northward has built the land, and is to
+the front when we are at our epic work.  Meanwhile it gets us a blowzy
+character, by shouldering roughly among the children of civilization.
+Skepsey, journeying one late afternoon up a Kentish line, had, in both
+senses of the word, encountered a long-limbed navvy; an intoxicated, he
+was compelled by his manly modesty to desire to think; whose loathly
+talk, forced upon the hearing of a decent old woman opposite him, passed
+baboonish behaviour; so much so, that Skepsey civilly intervened;
+subsequently inviting him to leave the carriage and receive a lesson at
+the station they were nearing.  Upon his promising faithfully, that it
+should be a true and telling lesson, the navvy requested this pygmy spark
+to flick his cheek, merely to show he meant war in due sincerity; and he
+as faithfully, all honour, promising not to let it bring about a breakage
+of the laws of the Company, Skepsey promptly did the deed.  So they went
+forth.
+
+Skepsey alluded to the incident, for an example of the lamentable
+deficiency in science betrayed by most of our strong men when put to it;
+and the bitter thought, that he could count well nigh to a certainty on
+the total absence of science in the long-armed navvy, whose fist on his
+nose might have been as the magnet of a pin, was chief among his
+reminiscences after the bout, destroying pleasure for the lover of Old
+England's might.  One blow would have sent Skepsey travelling.  He was
+not seriously struck once.  They parted, shaking hands; the navvy
+confessing himself to have 'drunk a drop'; and that perhaps accounted for
+his having been 'topped by a dot on him.'
+
+He declined to make oath never to repeat his offence; but said, sending
+his vanquisher to the deuce, with an amicable push at his shoulder,
+'Damned if I ever forget five foot five stretched six foot flat!'
+
+Skepsey counted his feet some small amount higher; but our hearty rovers'
+sons have their ballad moods when giving or taking a thrashing.  One of
+the third-class passengers, a lad of twenty, became Skepsey's pupil, and
+turned out clever with the gloves, and was persuaded to enter the
+militia, and grew soon to be a corporal.  Thus there was profit of the
+affair, though the navvy sank out of sight.  Let us hope and pray he will
+not insult the hearing of females again.  If only females knew how
+necessary it is, for their sakes, to be able to give a lesson now and
+then!  Ladies are positively opposed.  And Judges too, who dress so like
+them.  The manhood of our country is kept down, in consequence.  Mr.
+Durance was right, when he said something about the state of war being
+wanted to weld our races together: and yet we are always praying for
+the state of peace, which causes cracks and gaps among us!  Was that
+what he meant by illogical?  It seemed to Skepsey--oddly, considering
+his inferior estimate of the value of the fair sex--that a young woman
+with whom he had recently made acquaintance; and who was in Brighton now,
+upon missionary work; a member of the 'Army,' an officer of advancing
+rank, Matilda Pridden, by name; was nearer to the secret of the right
+course of conduct for individual citizens and the entire country than any
+gentleman he knew.
+
+Yes, nearer to it than his master was!  Thinking of Mr. Victor Radnor,
+Skepsey fetched a sigh.  He had knocked at his master's door at the
+office one day, and imagining the call to enter, had done so, and had
+seen a thing he could not expunge.  Lady Grace Halley was there.  From
+matters he gathered, Skepsey guessed her to be working for his master
+among the great folks, as he did with Jarniman, and Mr. Fenellan with Mr.
+Carling.  But is it usual; he asked himself--his natural veneration
+framing the rebuke to his master thus--to repay the services of a lady
+so warmly?--We have all of us an ermined owl within us to sit in
+judgement of our superiors as well as our equals; and the little man,
+notwithstanding a servant's bounden submissiveness, was forced to hear
+the judicial pronouncement upon his master's behaviour.  His master had,
+at the same time, been saying most weighty kind words more and more of
+late: one thing:--that, if he gave all he had to his fellows, and did all
+he could, he should still be in their debt.  And he was a very wealthy
+gentleman.  What are we to think?  The ways of our superiors are
+wonderful.  We do them homage: still we feel, we painfully feel, we are
+beginning to worship elsewhere.  It is the pain of a detachment of the
+very roots of our sea-weed heart from a rock.  Mr. Victor Radnor was an
+honour to his country.  Skepsey did not place the name of Matilda Pridden
+beside it or in any way compare two such entirely different persons.  At
+the same time and most earnestly, while dreading to hear, he desired to
+have Matilda Pridden's opinion of the case distressing him.  He never
+could hear it, because he could never be allowed to expound the case to
+her.  Skepsey sighed again: he as much as uttered: Oh, if we had a few
+thousands like her!--But what if we do have them?  They won't marry!
+There they are, all that the country requires in wives and mothers; and
+like Miss Priscilla Graves, they won't marry!
+
+He looked through sad thoughts across the benches of the compartments to
+the farther end of the carriage, where sat the Rev. Septimus Barmby,
+looking at him through a meditation as obscure if not so mournful.  Few
+are the third-class passengers outward at that early hour in the winter
+season, and Skepsey's gymnastics to get beside the Rev. Septimus were
+unimpeded; though a tight-packed carriage of us poor journaliers would
+not have obstructed them with as much as a sneer.  Mr. Barmby and Skepsey
+greeted.  The latter said, he had a holiday, to pay a visit to Miss
+Nesta.  The former said, he hoped he should see Miss Nesta.  Skepsey then
+rapidly brought the conversation to a point where Matilda Pridden was
+comprised.  He discoursed of the 'Army' and her position in the Army,
+giving instances of her bravery, the devotion shown by her to the cause
+of morality, in all its forms.  Mr. Barmby had his fortunes on his hands
+at the moment, he could not lend an attentive ear; and he disliked this
+Army, the title it had taken, and the mixing of women and men in its
+ranks; not to speak of a presumption in its proceedings, and the public
+marching and singing.  Moreover, he enjoyed his one or two permissible
+glasses: he doubted that the Chiefs of the Army had common benevolence
+for the inoffensive pipe.  But the cause of morality was precious to him;
+morality and a fit of softness, and the union of the happiest contrast of
+voices, had set him for a short while, before the dawn of Nesta's day,
+hankering after Priscilla Graves.  Skepsey's narrative of Matilda
+Pridden's work down at the East of London; was effective; it had the ring
+to thrill a responsive chord in Mr. Barmby, who mused on London's East,
+and martyrly service there.  His present expectations were of a very
+different sort; but a beautiful bride, bringing us wealth, is no
+misleading beam, if we direct the riches rightly.  Septimus, a solitary
+minister in those grisly haunts of the misery breeding vice, must needs
+accomplish less than a Septimus the husband of one of England's chief
+heiresses:--only not the most brilliant, owing to circumstances known to
+the Rev. Groseman Buttermore: strangely, and opportunely, revealed: for
+her exceeding benefit, it may be hoped.  She is no longer the ignorant
+girl, to reject the protecting hand of one whose cloth is the best of
+cloaking.  A glance at Dudley Sowerby's defection, assures our worldly
+wisdom too, that now is the time to sue.
+
+Several times while Mr. Barmby made thus his pudding of the desires of
+the flesh and the spirit, Skepsey's tales of Matilda Pridden's heroism
+caught his attention.  He liked her deeds; he disliked the position in
+which the young woman placed herself to perform them; and he said so.
+Women are to be women, he said.
+
+Skepsey agreed: 'If we could get men to do the work, sir!'
+
+Mr. Barmby was launching forth: Plenty of men!--His mouth was blocked by
+the reflection, that we count the men on our fingers; often are we, as it
+were, an episcopal thumb surveying scarce that number of followers!  He
+diverged to censure of the marchings and the street-singing: the
+impediment to traffic, the annoyance to a finely musical ear.  He
+disapproved altogether of Matilda Pridden's military display, pronouncing
+her to be, 'Doubtless a worthy young person.'
+
+'Her age is twenty-seven,' said Skepsey, spying at the number of his own.
+
+'You have known her long?' Mr. Barmby asked.
+
+'Not long, sir.  She has gone through trouble.  She believes very
+strongly in the will:--If I will this, if I will that, and it is the
+right will, not wickedness, it is done--as good as done; and force is
+quite superfluous.  In her sermons, she exhorts to prayer before action.'
+
+'Preaches?'
+
+'She moves a large assembly, sir.'
+
+'It would seem, that England is becoming Americanized!' exclaimed the
+Conservative in Mr. Barmby.  Almost he groaned; and his gaze was fish-
+like in vacancy, on hearing the little man speak of the present intrepid
+forwardness of the sex to be publicly doing.  It is for men the most
+indigestible fact of our century: one that--by contrast throws an
+overearthly holiness on our decorous dutiful mothers, who contentedly
+worked below the surface while men unremittingly attended to their
+interests above.
+
+Skepsey drew forth a paper-covered shilling-book: a translation from the
+French, under a yelling title of savage hate of Old England and cannibal
+glee at her doom.  Mr. Barmby dropped his eyelashes on it, without
+comment; nor did he reply to Skepsey's forlorn remark: 'We let them think
+they could do it!'
+
+Behold the downs.  Breakfast is behind them.  Miss Radnor likewise: if
+the poor child has a name.  We propose to supply the deficiency.  She
+does not declare war upon tobacco.  She has a cultured and a beautiful
+voice.  We abstain from enlargeing on the charms of her person.  She has
+resources, which representatives of a rival creed would plot to secure.
+
+'Skepsey, you have your quarters at the house of Miss Radnor's
+relatives?' said Mr. Barmby, as they emerged from tunnelled chalk.
+
+'Mention, that I think of calling in the course of the day.'
+
+A biscuit had been their breakfast without a name.
+
+They parted at the station, roused by the smell of salt to bestow a more
+legitimate title on the day's restorative beginning.  Down the hill,
+along by the shops, and Skepsey, in sight of Miss Nesta's terrace,
+considered it still an early hour for a visitor; so, to have the sea
+about him, he paid pier-money, and hurried against the briny wings of a
+South-wester; green waves, curls of foam, flecks of silver, under low-
+flying grey-dark cloud-curtains shaken to a rift, where at one shot the
+sun had a line of Nereids nodding, laughing, sparkling to him.  Skepsey
+enjoyed it, at the back of thoughts military and naval.  Visible sea,
+this girdle of Britain, inspired him to exultations in reverence.  He
+wished Mr. Durance could behold it now and have such a breastful.  He was
+wishing he knew a song of Britain and sea, rather fancying Mr. Durance to
+be in some way a bar to patriotic poetical recollection, when he saw his
+Captain Dartrey mounting steps out of an iron anatomy of the pier, and
+looking like a razor off a strap.
+
+'Why, sir!' cried Skepsey.
+
+'Just a plunge and a dozen strokes,' Dartrey said; 'and you'll come to my
+hotel and give me ten minutes of the "recreation"; and if you don't come
+willingly, I shall insult your country.'
+
+'Ah!  I wish Mr. Durance were here,' Skepsey rejoined.
+
+'It would upset his bumboat of epigrams.  He rises at ten o'clock to a
+queasy breakfast by candlelight, and proceeds to composition.  His
+picture of the country is a portrait of himself by the artist.'
+
+'But, sir, Captain Dartrey, you don't think as Mr. Durance does of
+England!'
+
+'There are lots to flatter her, Skepsey!  A drilling can't do her harm.
+You're down to see Miss Nesta.  Ladies don't receive quite so early.  And
+have you breakfasted?  Come on with me quick.'  Dartrey led him on,
+saying: 'You have an eye at my stick.  It was a legacy to me, by word of
+mouth, from a seaman of a ship I sailed in, who thought I had done him a
+service; and he died after all.  He fell overboard drunk.  He perished of
+the villain stuff.  One of his messmates handed me the stick in Cape
+Town, sworn to deliver it.  A good knot to grasp; and it 's flexible and
+strong; stick or rattan, whichever you please; it gives point or caresses
+the shoulder; there's no break in it, whack as you may.  They call it a
+Demerara supple-jack.  I'll leave it to you.'
+
+Skepsey declared his intention to be the first to depart.  He tried the
+temper of the stick, bent it a bit, and admired the prompt straightening.
+
+'It would give a good blow, sir.'
+
+'Does its business without braining.'
+
+Perhaps for the reason, that it was not a handsome instrument for display
+on fashionable promenades, Dartrey chose it among his collection by
+preference; as ugly dogs of a known fidelity are chosen for companions.
+The Demerara supple-jack surpasses bull-dogs in its fashion of assisting
+the master; for when once at it, the clownish-looking thing reflects upon
+him creditably, by developing a refined courtliness of style, while in no
+way showing a diminution of jolly ardour for the fray.  It will deal you
+the stroke of a bludgeon with the playfulness of a cane.  It bears
+resemblance to those accomplished natural actors, who conversationally
+present a dramatic situation in two or three spontaneous flourishes, and
+are themselves again, men of the world, the next minute.
+
+Skepsey handed it back.  He spoke of a new French rifle.  He mentioned,
+in the form of query for no answer, the translation of the barking little
+volume he had shown to Mr. Barmby: he slapped at his breast-pocket, where
+it was.  Not a ship was on the sea-line; and he seemed to deplore that
+vacancy.
+
+'But it tells both ways,' Dartrey said.  'We don't want to be hectoring
+in the Channel.  All we want, is to be sure of our power, so as not to go
+hunting and fawning for alliances.  Up along that terrace Miss Nesta
+lives.  Brighton would be a choice place for a landing.'
+
+Skepsey temporized, to get his national defences, by pleading the
+country's love of peace.
+
+'Then you give-up your portion of the gains of war--an awful
+disgorgement,' said Dartrey.  'If you are really for peace, you toss
+all your spare bones to the war-dogs.  Otherwise, Quakerly preaching is
+taken for hypocrisy.'
+
+'I 'm afraid we are illogical, sir,' said Skepsey, adopting one of the
+charges of Mr. Durance, to elude the abominable word.
+
+'In you run, my friend.'  Dartrey sped him up the steps of the hotel.
+
+A little note lay on his breakfast-table.  His invalid uncle's valet gave
+the morning's report of the night.
+
+The note was from Mrs. Blathenoy: she begged Captain Dartrey, in double
+underlinings of her brief words, to mount the stairs.  He debated, and he
+went.
+
+She was excited, and showed a bosom compressed to explode: she had been
+weeping.  'My husband is off.  He bids me follow him.  What would you
+have me do?'
+
+'Go.'
+
+'You don't care what may happen to your friends, the Radnors?'
+
+'Not at the cost of your separation from your husband.'
+
+'You have seen him!'
+
+'Be serious.'
+
+'Oh, you cold creature!  You know--you see: I can't conceal.  And you
+tell me to go.  "Go!"  Gracious heavens!  I've no claim on you; I haven't
+been able to do much; I would have--never mind!  believe me or not.  And
+now I'm to go: on the spot, I suppose.  You've seen the man I 'm to go
+to, too.  I would bear it, if it were not away from .  .  .  out of sight
+of I'm a fool of a woman, I know.  There's frankness for you! and I could
+declare you're saying "impudence" in your heart--or what you have for
+one.  Have you one?'
+
+'My dear soul, it 's a flint.  So just think of your duty.'  Dartrey
+played the horrid part of executioner with some skill.
+
+Her bosom sprang to descend into abysses.
+
+'And never a greater fool than when I sent for you to see such a face as
+I'm showing!' she cried, with lips that twitched and fingers that plucked
+at her belt.  'But you might feel my hatred of being tied to--dragged
+about over the Continent by that .  .  .  perhaps you think a woman is
+not sensible of vulgarity in her husband!  I 'm bothering you?  I don't
+say I have the slightest claim.  You never made love to me, never!  Never
+so much as pressed my hand or looked.  Others have--as much as I let
+them.  And before I saw you, I had not an idea of another man but that
+man.  So you advise me to go?'
+
+'There's no other course.'
+
+'No other course.  I don't see one.  What have I been dreaming of!
+Usually a woman feeling .  .  .'  she struck at her breast, 'has had a
+soft word in her ear.  "Go!"  I don't blame you, Captain Dartrey.  At
+least, you 're not the man to punish a woman for stripping herself, as I
+'ve done.  I call myself a fool--I'm a lunatic.  Trust me with your
+hand.'
+
+'There you are.'
+
+She grasped the hand, and shut her eyes to make a long age of the holding
+on to him.  'Oh, you dear dear fellow!--don't think me unwomanly; I must
+tell you now: I am naked and can't disguise.  I see you are ice--feel:
+and if you were different, I might be.  You won't be hurt by hearing
+you've made yourself dear to me--without meaning to, I know!  It began
+that day at Lakelands; I fell in love with you the very first minute I
+set eyes on you!  There's a confession for a woman to make! and a married
+woman!  I'm married, and I no more feel allegiance, as they call it, than
+if there never had been a ceremony and no Jacob Blathenoy was in
+existence.  And why I should go to him!  But you shan't be troubled.
+I did not begin to live, as a woman, before I met you.  I can speak all
+this to you because--we women can't be deceived in that--you are one of
+the men who can be counted on for a friend.'
+
+'I hope so,' Dartrey said, and his mouth hardened as nature's electricity
+shot sparks into him from the touch and rocked him.
+
+'No, not yet: I will soon let it drop,' said she, and she was just then
+thrillingly pretty; she caressed the hand, placing it at her throat and
+moving her chin on it, as women fondle birds.  'I am positively to go,
+then?'
+
+'Positively, you are to go; and it's my command.'
+
+'Not in love with any one at all?'
+
+'Not with a soul.'
+
+'Not with a woman?'
+
+'With no woman.'
+
+'Nor maid?'
+
+'No! and no to everything.  And an end to the catechism!'
+
+'It is really a flint that beats here?' she said, and with a shyness in
+adventurousness, she struck the point of her forefinger on the rib.
+'Fancy me in love with a flint!  And running to be dutiful to a Jacob
+Blathenoy, at my flint's command.  I'm half in love with doing what I
+hate, because this cold thing here bids me do it.  I believe I married
+for money, and now it looks as if I were to have my bargain with poverty
+to bless it.'
+
+'There I may help,' said Dartrey, relieved at sight of a loophole, to
+spring to some initiative out of the paralysis cast on him by a pretty
+little woman's rending of her veil.  A man of honour alone with a woman
+who has tossed concealment to the winds, is a riddled target indeed: he
+is tempted to the peril of cajoleing, that he may escape from the torment
+and the ridicule; he is tempted to sigh for the gallant spirit of his
+naughty adolescence.  'Come to me--will you?--apply to me, if there's
+ever any need.  I happen to have money.  And forgive me for naming it.'
+
+She groaned: 'Don't!  I'm, sure, and I thought it from the first, you're
+one of the good men, and the woman who meets you is lucky, and wretched,
+and so she ought to be!  Only to you should I!  .  .  .  do believe that!
+I won't speak of what excuses I've got.  You've seen.'
+
+'Don't think of them: there'll be danger in it.
+
+'Shall you think of me in danger?'
+
+'Silly, silly!  Don't you see you have to do with a flint!  I've gone
+through fire.  And if I were in love with you, I should start you off to
+your husband this blessed day.'
+
+'And you're not the slightest wee wee bit in love with me!'
+
+'Perfectly true; but I like you; and if we're to be hand in hand, in the
+time to come, you must walk firm at present.'
+
+'I'm to go to-day?'
+
+'You are.'
+
+'Without again.'
+
+The riddled target kicked.  Dartrey contrasted Jacob Blathenoy with the
+fair wife, and commiseratingly exonerated her; he lashed at himself for
+continuing to be in this absurdest of postures, and not absolutely secure
+for all that.  His head shook.  'Friends, you'll find best.'
+
+'Well!' she sighed, 'I feel I'm doomed to go famished through life.
+There's never to be such a thing as, love, for me!  I can't tell you no
+woman could: though you'll say I've told enough.  I shall burn with shame
+when I think of it.  I could go on my knees to have your arms round me
+once.  I could kill myself for saying it!--I should feel that I had one
+moment of real life.--I know I ought to admire you.  They say a woman
+hates if she's refused.  I can't: I wish I were able to.  I could have
+helped the Radnors better by staying here and threatening never to go to
+him unless he swore not to do them injury.  He's revengeful.  Just as you
+like.  You say "Go," and I go.  There.  I may kiss your hand?'
+
+'Give me yours.'
+
+Dartrey kissed the hand.  She kissed the mark of his lips.  He got
+himself away, by promising to see her to the train for Paris.  Outside
+her door, he was met by the reflection, coming as a thing external, that
+he might veraciously and successfully have pleaded a passionate hunger
+for breakfast: nay, that he would have done so, if he had been downright
+in earnest.  For she had the prettiness to cast a spell; a certain curve
+at the lips, a fluttering droop of the eyelids, a corner of the eye, that
+led long distances away to forests and nests.  This little woman had the
+rosy-peeping June bud's plumpness.  What of the man who refused to kiss
+her once?  Cold antecedent immersion had to be thanked; and stringent
+vacuity; perhaps a spotting ogre-image of her possessor.  Some sense of
+right-doing also, we hope.  Dartrey angrily attributed his good conduct
+to the lowest motives.  He went so far as to accuse himself of having
+forborne to speak of breakfast, from a sort of fascinated respect for the
+pitch of a situation that he despised and detested.  Then again, when
+beginning to eat, his good conduct drew on him a chorus of the jeers of
+all the martial comrades he had known.  But he owned he would have had
+less excuse than they, had he taken advantage of a woman's inability,
+at a weak moment, to protect herself: or rather, if he had not behaved
+in a manner to protect her from herself.  He thought of his buried wife,
+and the noble in the base of that poor soul; needing constantly a present
+helper, for the nobler to conquer.  Be true man with a woman, she must be
+viler than the devil has yet made one, if she does not follow a strong
+right lead:--but be patient, of course.  And the word patience here means
+more than most men contain.  Certainly a man like Jacob Blathenoy was a
+mouthful for any woman: and he had bought his wife, he deserved no pity.
+Not?  Probably not.  That view, however, is unwholesome and opens on
+slides.  Pity of his wife, too, gets to be fervidly active with her
+portrait, fetches her breath about us.  As for condemnation of the poor
+little woman, her case was not unexampled, though the sudden flare of it
+startled rather.  Mrs. Victor could read men and women closely.  Yes, and
+Victor, when he schemed--but Dartrey declined to be throwing blame right
+or left.  More than by his breakfast, and in a preferable direction, he
+was refreshed by Skepsey's narrative of the deeds of Matilda Pridden.
+
+'The right sort of girl for you to know, Skepsey,' he said.  'The best in
+life is a good woman.'
+
+Skepsey exhibited his book of the Gallic howl.
+
+'They have their fits now and then, and they're soon over and forgotten,'
+Dartrey said.  'The worst of it is, that we remember.'
+
+After the morning's visit to his uncle, he peered at half a dozen sticks
+in the corner of the room, grasped their handles, and selected the
+Demerara supple-jack, for no particular reason; the curved knot was easy
+to the grasp.  It was in his mind, that this person signing herself
+Judith Marsett, might have something to say, which intimately concerned
+Nesta.  He fell to brooding on it, until he wondered why he had not been
+made a trifle anxious by the reading of the note overnight.  Skepsey was
+left at Nesta's house.
+
+Dartrey found himself expected by the servant waiting on Mrs. Marsett.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+SHOWS HOW TEMPER MAY KINDLE TEMPER AND AN INDIGNANT WOMAN GET HER WEAPON
+
+Judith Marsett stood in her room to receive Nesta's hero.  She was
+flushed, and had thinned her lips for utterance of a desperate thing,
+after the first severe formalities.
+
+Her aim was to preserve an impressive decorum.  She was at the same time
+burning to speak out furious wrath, in words of savage rawness, if they
+should come, as a manner of slapping the world's cheek for the state to
+which it reduces its women; whom one of the superior creatures can
+insult, and laugh.
+
+Men complaining of the 'peace which is near their extinction,' have but
+to shuffle with the sex; they will experience as remarkable a change as
+if they had passed off land on to sea.
+
+Dartrey had some flitting notion of the untamed original elements women
+can bring about us, in his short observant bow to Mrs. Marsett, following
+so closely upon the scene with Mrs. Blathenoy.
+
+But this handsome woman's look of the dull red line of a sombre fire,
+that needed only stir of a breath to shoot the blaze, did not at all
+alarm him.  He felt refreshingly strung by it.
+
+She was discerned at a glance to be an aristocratic member of regions
+where the senses perpetually simmer when they are not boiling.  The talk
+at the Club recurred to him.  How could Nesta have come to know the
+woman?  His questioning of the chapter of marvellous accidents, touched
+Nesta simply, as a young girl to be protected, without abhorrently
+involving the woman.  He had his ideas of the Spirit of Woman stating her
+case to the One Judge, for lack of an earthly just one: a story different
+from that which is proclaimed pestilential by the body of censors under
+conservatory glass; where flesh is delicately nurtured, highly prized;
+spirit not so much so; and where the pretty tricking of the flesh is
+taken for a spiritual ascendancy.
+
+In spite of her turbulent breast's burden to deliver, Mrs. Marsett's
+feminine acuteness was alive upon Dartrey, confirming here and there
+Nesta's praises of him.  She liked his build and easy carriage of a
+muscular frame: her Ned was a heavy man.  More than Dartrey's figure,
+as she would have said, though the estimate came second, she liked his
+manner with her.  Not a doubt was there, that he read her position.  She
+could impose upon some: not upon masculine eyes like these.  They did not
+scrutinize, nor ruffle a smooth surface with a snap at petty impressions;
+and they were not cynically intimate or dominating or tentatively
+amorous: clear good fellowship was in them.  And it was a blessedness
+(whatever might be her feeling later, when she came to thank him at
+heart) to be in the presence of a man whose appearance breathed of
+offering her common ground, whereon to meet and speak together,
+unburdened by the hunting world, and by the stoneing world.  Such common
+ground seems a kind of celestial to the better order of those excluded
+from it.
+
+Dartrey relieved her midway in a rigid practice of the formalities: 'I
+think I may guess that you have something to tell me relating to Miss
+Radnor?'
+
+'It is.'  Mrs. Marsett gathered up for an immediate plunge, and deferred
+it.  'I met her--we went out with the riding-master.  She took to me.
+I like her--I could say' (the woman's voice dropped dead low, in a
+tremble), 'I love her.  She is young: I could kneel to her.  Do you know
+a Major Worrell?'
+
+'Worrell?  no.'
+
+'He is a-calls himself a friend of my--of Captain Marsett's.  He met us
+out one day.'
+
+'He permitted himself to speak to Miss Radnor?'
+
+She rejoiced in Dartrey's look.  'Not then.  First let me tell you.  I
+can hardly tell you.  But Miss Radnor tells me you are not like other
+men.  You have made your conclusions already.  Are you asking what right
+I had to be knowing her?  It is her goodness.  Accident began it; I did
+not deceive her; as soon as ever I could I--I have Captain Marsett's
+promise to me: at present he's situated, he--but I opened my heart to
+her: as much as a woman can.  It came!  Did I do very wrong?'
+
+'I'm not here to decide: continue, pray.'
+
+Mrs. Marsett aimed at formal speech, and was driving upon her natural in
+anger.  'I swear I did it for the best. She is an innocent girl .  .  .
+young lady: only she has a head; she soon reads things.  I saw the kind
+of cloud in her.  I spoke.  I felt bound to: she said she would not
+forsake me.--I was bound to!  And it was enough to break my heart, to
+think of her despising me.  No, she forgave, pitied;--she was kind.
+Those are the angels who cause us to think of changeing.  I don't care
+for sermons, but when I meet charity: I won't bore you!'
+
+'You don't.'
+
+'My .  .  .  Captain Marsett can't bear--he calls it Psalmody.  He thinks
+things ought always to be as they are, with women and men; and women
+preachers he does detest.  She is not one to preach.  You are waiting to
+hear what I have to tell.  That man Major Worrell has tried to rob me of
+everything I ever had to set a value on:--love, I 'd say;--he laughs at a
+woman like me loving.'
+
+Dartrey nodded, to signify a known sort of fellow.
+
+'She came here.'  Mrs. Marsett's tears had risen.  'I ought not to have
+let her come.  I invited her--for once: I am lonely.  None of my sex--
+none I could respect!  I meant it for only once.  She promised to sing to
+me.  And, Oh!  how she sings!  You have heard her.  My whole heart came
+out.  I declare I believe girls exist who can hear our way of life--and
+I'm not so bad except compared with that angel, who heard me, and was
+and is, I could take oath, no worse for it.  Some girls can; she is one.
+I am all for bringing them up in complete innocence.  If I was a great
+lady, my daughters should never know anything of the world until they
+were married.  But Miss Radnor is a young lady who cannot be hurt.  She
+is above us.  Oh!  what a treasure for a man!--and my God! for any man
+born of woman to insult a saint, as she is!--He is a beast!'
+
+'Major Worrell met her here?'
+
+'Blame me as much as you like: I do myself.  Half my rage with him is at
+myself for putting her in the way of such a beast to annoy.  Each time
+she came, I said it was to be the last.  I let her see what a mercy from
+heaven she was to me.  She would come.  It has not been many times.  She
+wishes me either to .  .  .  Captain Marsett has promised.  And nothing
+seems hard--to me when my own God's angel is by.  She is!  I'm not such a
+bad woman, but I never before I knew her knew the meaning of the word
+virtue.  There is the young lady that man worried with his insulting
+remarks! though he must have known she was a lady:--because he found her
+in my rooms.'
+
+'You were present when, as you say, he insulted her?'
+
+'I was.  Here it commenced; and he would see her downstairs.'
+
+'You heard?'
+
+'Of course, I never left her.'
+
+'Give me a notion  .  .  .'
+
+'To get her to make an appointment: to let him conduct her home.'
+
+'She was alone?'
+
+'Her maid was below.'
+
+'And this happened .  .  .?'
+
+'Yesterday, after dark.  My Ned--Captain Marsett encourages him to be
+familiar.  I should be the lowest of women if I feared the threats of
+such a reptile of a man.  I could tell you more.  I can't always refuse
+his visits, though if Ned knew the cur he is!  Captain Marsett is easy-
+going.'
+
+'I should like to know where he lives.'
+
+She went straight to the mantelpiece, and faced about with a card,
+handing it, quite aware that it was a charge of powder.
+
+Desperate things to be done excused the desperate said; and especially
+they seemed a cover to the bald and often spotty language leaping out of
+her, against her better taste, when her temper was up.
+
+'Somewhere not very distant,' said Dartrey perusing.  'Is he in the town
+to-day, do you know?'
+
+'I am not sure; he may be.  Her name .  .  .'
+
+'Have no fear.  Ladies' names are safe.'
+
+'I am anxious that she may not be insulted again.'
+
+'Did she show herself conscious of it?'
+
+'She stopped speaking: she looked at the door.  She may come again--or
+never! through that man!'
+
+'You receive him, at his pleasure?'
+
+'Captain Marsett wishes me to.  He is on his way home.  He calls Major
+Worrell my pet spite.  All I want is; not to hear of the man.  I swear
+he came yesterday on the chance of seeing--for he forced his way up past
+my servant; he must have seen Miss Radnor's maid below.'
+
+'You don't mean, that he insulted her hearing?'
+
+'Oh!  Captain Fenellan, you know the style.'
+
+'Well, I thank you,' Dartrey said.  'The young lady is the daughter of my
+dearest friends.  She's one of the precious--you're quite right.  Keep
+the tears back.'
+
+'I will.'  She heaved open-mouthed to get physical control of the tide.
+'When you say that of her!--how can I help it?  It's I fear, because I
+fear .  .  .  and I've no right to expect ever .  .  .  but if I'm never
+again to look on that dear face, tell her I shall--I shall pray for her
+in my grave.  Tell her she has done all a woman can, an angel can, to
+save my soul.  I speak truth: my very soul!  I could never go to the
+utter bad after knowing her.  I don't--you know the world--I'm a poor
+helpless woman!--don't swear to give up my Ned if he does break the word
+he promised once; I can't see how I could.  I haven't her courage.
+I haven't--what it is!  You know her: it's in her eyes and her voice.
+If I had her beside me, then I could starve or go to execution--I could,
+I am certain.  Here I am, going to do what you men hate.  Let me sit.'
+
+'Here's a chair,' said Dartrey.  'I've no time to spare; good day, for
+the present.  You will permit me to call.'
+
+'Oh!  come'; she cried, out of her sobs, for excuse.  They were genuine,
+or she would better have been able to second her efforts to catch a
+distinct vision of his retreating figure.
+
+She beheld him, when he was in the street, turn for the district where
+Major Worrell had his lodgeings.  That set her mind moving, and her tears
+fell no longer.
+
+Major Worrell was not at home.  Dartrey was informed that he might be at
+his Club.
+
+At the Club he heard of the major as having gone to London and being
+expected down in the afternoon.  Colonel Sudley named the train:
+an early train; the major was engaged to dine at the Club.  Dartrey had
+information supplied to him concerning Major Worrell and Captain Marsett,
+also Mrs. Marsett.  She had a history.  Worthy citizens read the
+description of history with interest when the halo of Royalty is round
+it.  They may, if their reading extends, perceive, that it has been the
+main turbid stream in old Mammon's train since he threw his bait for
+flesh.  They might ask, too, whether it is likely to cease to flow while
+he remains potent.  The lady's history was brief, and bore recital in a
+Club; came off quite honourably there.  Regarding Major Worrell, the tale
+of him showed him to have a pass among men.  He managed cleverly to get
+his pleasures out of a small income and a 'fund of anecdote.'  His
+reputation indicated an anecdotist of the table, prevailing in the
+primitive societies, where the art of conversing does not come by nature,
+and is exercised in monosyllabic undertones or grunts until the
+narrator's well-masticated popular anecdote loosens a digestive laughter,
+and some talk ensues.  He was Marsett's friend, and he boasted of not
+letting Ned Marsett make a fool of himself.
+
+Dartrey was not long in shaping the man's character: Worrell belonged
+to the male birds of upper air, who mangle what female prey they are
+forbidden to devour.  And he had Miss Radnor's name: he had spoken her
+name at the Club overnight.  He had roused a sensation, because of a man
+being present, Percy Southweare, who was related to a man as good as
+engaged to marry her.  The major never fell into a quarrel with sons of
+nobles, if he could help it, or there might have been a pretty one.
+
+So Colonel Sudley said.
+
+Dartrey spoke musing: 'I don't know how he may class me; I have an
+account to square with him.'
+
+'It won't do in these days, my good friend.  Come and cool yourself; and
+we'll lunch here.  I shan't leave you.'
+
+'By all means.  We'll lunch, and walk up to the station, and you will
+point him out to me.'
+
+Dartrey stated Major Worrell's offence.  The colonel was not astonished;
+but evidently he thought less of Worrell's behaviour to Miss Radnor in
+Mrs. Marsett's presence than of the mention of her name at the Club: and
+that, he seemed to think, had a shade of excuse against the charge of
+monstrous.  He blamed the young lady who could go twice to visit a Mrs.
+Marsett; partly exposed a suspicion of her.  Dartrey let him talk.  They
+strolled along the parade, and were near the pier.
+
+Suddenly saying: 'There, beside our friend in clerical garb: here she
+comes; judge if that is the girl for the foulest of curs to worry, no
+matter where she's found.'  Dartrey directed the colonel's attention to
+Nesta and Mr. Barmby turning off the pier and advancing.
+
+He saluted.  She bowed.  There was no contraction of her eyelids; and her
+face was white.  The mortal life appeared to be deadened in her cold wide
+look; as when the storm-wind banks a leaden remoteness, leaving blown
+space of sky.
+
+The colonel said: 'No, that's not the girl a gentleman would offend.'
+
+'What man!' cried Dartrey.  'If we had a Society for the trial of your
+gentleman!--but he has only to call himself gentleman to get grant of
+licence: and your Society protects him.  It won't punish, and it won't
+let you.  But you saw her: ask yourself--what man could offend that
+girl!'
+
+'Still, my friend, she ought to keep clear of the Marsetts.'
+
+'When I meet him, I shall treat him as one out of the law.'
+
+'You lead on to an ultimate argument with the hangman.'
+
+We 'll dare it, to waken the old country.  Old England will count none
+but Worrells in time.  As for discreet, if you like!--the young lady
+might have been more discreet.  She's a girl with a big heart.  If we
+were all everlastingly discreet!'
+
+Dartrey may have meant, that the consequence of a prolonged conformity
+would be the generation of stenches to shock to purgeing tempests the
+tolerant heavens over such smooth stagnancy.  He had his ideas about
+movement; about the good of women, and the health of his England.  The
+feeling of the hopelessness of pleading Nesta's conduct, for the perfect
+justification of it to son or daughter of our impressing conventional
+world--even to a friend, that friend a true man, a really chivalrous man
+--drove him back in a silence upon his natural brotherhood with souls
+that dare do.  It was a wonder, to think of his finding this kinship in a
+woman.  In a girl?--and the world holding that virgin spirit to be
+unclean or shadowed because its rays were shed on foul places?  He
+clasped the girl.  Her smitten clear face, the face of the second sigh
+after torture, bent him in devotion to her image.
+
+The clasping and the worshipping were independent of personal ardours:
+quaintly mixed with semi-paternal recollections of the little 'blue
+butterfly' of the days at Craye.  Farm and Creckholt; and he had heard of
+Dudley Sowerby's pretensions to; her hand.  Nesta's youthfulness cast
+double age on him from the child's past.  He pictured the child; pictured
+the girl, with her look of solitariness of sight; as in the desolate wide
+world, where her noble compassion for a woman had unexpectedly,
+painfully, almost by transubstantiation, rack-screwed her to woman's
+mind.  And above sorrowful, holy were those eyes.
+
+They held sway over Dartrey, and lost it some steps on; his demon temper
+urgeing him to strike at Major Worrell, as the cause of her dismayed
+expression.  He was not the happier for dropping to his nature; but we
+proceed more easily, all of us, when the strain which lifts us a foot or
+two off our native level is relaxed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+A PAIR OF WOOERS
+
+That ashen look of the rise out of death from one of our mortal wounds,
+was caused by deeper convulsions in Nesta's bosom than Dartrey could
+imagine.
+
+She had gone for the walk with Mr. Barmby, reading the omen of his tones
+in the request.  Dorothea and Virginia would have her go.  The clerical
+gentleman, a friend of the Rev. Abram Posterley; and one who deplored
+poor Mr. Posterley's infatuation; and one besides who belonged to Nesta's
+musical choir in London: seemed a safe companion for the child.
+The grand organ of Mr. Barmby's voice, too, assured them of a devout
+seriousness in him, that arrested any scrupulous little questions.  They
+could not conceive his uttering the nonsensical empty stuff, compliments
+to their beauty and what not, which girls hear sometimes from
+inconsiderate gentlemen, to the having of their heads turned.  Moreover,
+Nesta had rashly promised her father's faithful servant Skepsey to walk,
+out with him in the afternoon; and the ladies hoped she would find the
+morning's walk to have been enough; good little man though Skepsey was,
+they were sure.  But there is the incongruous for young women of station
+on a promenade.
+
+Mr. Barmby headed to the pier.  After pacing up and down between the
+briny gulls and a polka-band, he made his way forethoughtfully to the
+glass-sheltered seats fronting East: where, as his enthusiasm for the
+solemnity of the occasion excited him to say, 'We have a view of the
+terraces and the cliffs'; and where not more than two enwrapped
+invalid figures were ensconsed.  Then it was, that Nesta recalled her
+anticipation of his possible design; forgotten by her during their talk
+of her dear people: Priscilla Graves and Mr. Pempton, and the Yatts, and
+Simeon Fenellan, Peridon and Catkin, and Skepsey likewise; and the very
+latest news of her mother.  She wished she could have run before him, to
+spare him.  He would not notice a sign.  Girls must wait and hear.
+
+It was an oratorio.  She watched the long wave roll on to the sinking
+into its fellow; and onward again for the swell and the weariful lapse;
+and up at last bursting to the sheet of white.  The far-heard roar and
+the near commingled, giving Mr. Barmby a semblance to the powers of
+ocean.
+
+At the first direct note, the burden of which necessitated a pause, she
+petitioned him to be her friend, to think of himself as her friend.
+
+But a vessel laden with merchandize, that has crossed wild seas for this
+particular port, is hardly to be debarred from discharging its goods on
+the quay by simple intimations of their not being wanted.  We are
+precipitated both by the aim and the tedium of the lengthened voyage to
+insist that they be seen.  We believe perforce in their temptingness;
+and should allurement fail, we fall back to the belief in our eloquence.
+An eloquence to expose the qualities they possess, is the testification
+in the promise of their excellence.  She is to be induced by feeling to
+see it.  We are asking a young lady for the precious gift of her hand.
+We respect her; and because of our continued respect, despite an
+obstruction, we have come to think we have a claim upon her gratitude;
+could she but be led to understand how different we are from some other
+man!--from one hitherto favoured among them, unworthy of this prize,
+however personally exalted and meritorious.
+
+The wave of wide extension rolled and sank and rose, heaving lifeless
+variations of the sickly streaks on its dull green back.
+
+Dudley Sowerby's defection was hinted at and accounted for, by the
+worldly test of worldly considerations.
+
+What were they?--Nesta glanced.
+
+An indistinct comparison was modestly presented, of one unmoved by
+worldly considerations.
+
+But what were they?  She was wakened by a lamp, and her darkness was all
+inflammable to it.
+
+'Oh!  Mr. Barmby, you have done me the honour to speak before; you know
+my answer,' she said.
+
+'You were then subject to an influence.  A false, I may say wicked,
+sentiment upholding celibacy.'
+
+'My poor Louise?  She never thought of influencing me.  She has her
+views, I mine.  Our friendship does not depend on a "treaty of
+reciprocity."  We are one at heart, each free to judge and act, as it
+should be in friendship.  I heard from her this morning.  Her brother
+will be able to resume his military duties next month.  Then she will
+return to me.'
+
+'We propose!' rejoined Mr. Barmby.
+
+Beholding the involuntary mercurial rogue-dimple he had started from a
+twitch at the corner, of her lips, the good gentleman pursued: 'Can we
+dare write our designs for the month to come?  Ah!--I will say--Nesta!
+give me the hope I beg to have.  See the seriousness.  You are at
+liberty.  That other has withdrawn his pretensions.  We will not blame
+him.  He is in expectation of exalted rank.  Where there is any shadow
+.  .  .  !'  Mr. Barmby paused on his outroll of the word; but
+immediately, not intending to weigh down his gentle hearer with the
+significance in it, resumed at a yet more sonorous depth: 'He is under
+the obligation to his family; an old, a venerable family.  In the full
+blaze of public opinion!  His conduct can be palliated by us, too.
+There is a right and wrong in minor things, independent of the higher
+rectitude.  We pardon, we can partly support, the worldly view.'
+
+'There is a shadow?' said Nesta; and her voice was lurefully encouraging.
+
+He was on the footing where men are precipitated by what is within them
+to blunder.  'On you--no.  On you personally, not at all.  No.  It could
+not be deemed so.  Not by those knowing, esteeming--not by him who loves
+you, and would, with his name, would, with his whole strength, envelop,
+shield .  .  .  certainly, certainly not.'
+
+'It is on my parents?' she said.
+
+'But to me nothing, nothing, quite nought!  To confound the innocent with
+the guilty!  .  .  .  and excuses may exist.  We know but how little we
+know!'
+
+'It is on both my parents?' she said; with a simplicity that induced him
+to reply: 'Before the world.  But not, I repeat .  .  .'
+
+The band-instruments behind the sheltering glass flourished on their
+termination of a waltz.
+
+She had not heeded their playing.  Now she said:
+
+'The music is over; we must not be late at lunch'; and she stood up and
+moved.
+
+He sprang to his legs and obediently stepped out:
+
+'I shall have your answer to-day, this evening?  Nesta!'
+
+'Mr. Barmby, it will be the same.  You will be kind to me in not asking
+me again.'
+
+He spoke further.  She was dumb.
+
+Had he done ill or well for himself and for her when he named the shadow
+on her parents?  He dwelt more on her than on himself: he would not have
+wounded her to win the blest affirmative.  Could she have been entirely
+ignorant?--and after Dudley Sowerby's defection?  For such it was: the
+Rev. Stuart Rem had declared the union between the almost designated head
+of the Cantor family and a young person of no name, of worse than no
+birth, impossible: 'absolutely and totally impossible,' he, had said, in
+his impressive fashion, speaking from his knowledge of the family, and an
+acquaintance with Dudley.  She must necessarily have learnt why Dudley
+Sowerby withdrew.  No parents of an attractive daughter should allow her
+to remain unaware of her actual position in the world.  It is criminal,
+a reduplication of the criminality!  Yet she had not spoken as one
+astonished.  She was mysterious.  Women are so: young women most of all.
+It is undecided still whether they do of themselves conceive principles,
+or should submit to an imposition of the same upon them in terrorem.
+Mysterious truly, but most attractive!  As Lady Bountiful of a district,
+she would have in her maturity the majestic stature to suit a
+dispensation of earthly good things.  And, strangely, here she was, at
+this moment, rivalling to excelling all others of her sex (he verified it
+in the crowd of female faces passing), when they, if they but knew the
+facts, would visit her very appearance beside them on a common footing as
+an intrusion and a scandal.  To us who know, such matters are indeed
+wonderful!
+
+Moved by reflective compassion, Mr. Barmby resumed the wooer's note, some
+few steps after he had responded to the salutation of Dartrey Fenellan
+and Colonel Sudley.  She did not speak.  She turned her forehead to him;
+and the absence of the world from her eyes chilled his tongue.
+
+He declined the pleasure of the lunch with the Duvidney ladies.  He
+desired to be alone, to question himself fasting, to sound the deed he
+had done; for he had struck on a suspicion of selfishness in it: and
+though Love must needs be an egoism, Love is no warrant for the doing of
+a hurt to the creature beloved.  Thoughts upon Skepsey and the tale of
+his Matilda Pridden's labours in poor neighbourhoods, to which he had
+been inattentive during the journey down to the sea, invaded him; they
+were persistent.  He was a worthy man, having within him the spiritual
+impulse curiously ready to take the place where a material disappointment
+left vacancy.  The vulgar sort embrace the devil at that stage.  Before
+the day had sunk, Mr. Barmby's lowest wish was, to be a light, as the
+instrument of his Church in her ministrations amid the haunts of sin and
+slime, to such plain souls as Daniel Skepsey and Matilda Pridden.  And he
+could still be that, if Nesta, in the chapters of the future, changed her
+mind.  She might; for her good she would; he reserved the hope.  His
+light was one to burn beneath an extinguisher.
+
+At the luncheon table of the Duvidney ladies, it was a pain to Dorothea
+and Virginia to witness how poor the appetite their Nesta brought in from
+the briny blowy walk.  They prophesied against her chances of a good
+sleep at night, if she did not eat heartily.  Virginia timidly remarked
+on her paleness.  Both of them put their simple arts in motion to let her
+know, that she was dear to them: so dear as to make them dread the hour
+of parting.  They named their dread of it.  They had consulted in private
+and owned to one another, that they did really love the child, and dared
+not look forward to what they would do without her.  The dear child's
+paleness and want of appetite (they remembered they were observing a weak
+innocent girl) suggested to them mutually the idea of a young female
+heart sickening, for the old unhappy maiden reason.  But, if only she
+might return with them to the Wells, the Rev. Stuart Rem would assure her
+to convince her of her not being quite, quite forsaken.  He, or some one
+having sanction from Victor, might ultimately (the ladies waiting
+anxiously in the next room, to fold her on the warmth of their bosoms
+when she had heard) impart to her the knowledge of circumstances, which
+would, under their further tuition concerning the particular sentiments
+of great families and the strict duties of the scions of the race, help
+to account for and excuse the Hon. Dudley Sowerby's behaviour.
+
+They went up to the drawing-room, talking of Skepsey and his tale of
+Miss Pridden, for Nesta's amusement.  Any talk of her Skepsey usually
+quickened her lips to reminiscent smiles and speech.  Now she held on
+to gazeing; and sadly, it seemed; as if some object were not present.
+
+For a vague encouragement, Dorothea said: 'One week, and we are back home
+at Moorsedge!'--not so far from Cronidge, was implied, for the
+administering of some foolish temporary comfort.  And it was as when a
+fish on land springs its hollow sides in alien air for the sustaining
+element; the girl panted; she clasped Dorothea's hand and looked at
+Virginia: 'My mother--I must see her!' she said.  They were slightly
+stupefied by the unwonted mention of her mother.  They made no reply.
+They never had done so when there was allusion to her mother.  Their
+silence now struck a gong at the girl's bosom.
+
+Dorothea had it in mind to say, that if she thirsted for any special
+comfort, the friends about her would offer consolation for confidence.
+
+Before she could speak, Perrin the footman entered, bearing the card of
+the Hon. Dudley Sowerby.
+
+Mr. Dudley Sowerby begged for an immediate interview with Miss Radnor.
+
+The ladies were somewhat agitated, but no longer perplexed as to their
+duties.  They had quitted Moorsedge to avoid the visit of his family.
+If he followed, it signified that which they could not withstand:--The
+'Tivoli falls!' as they named the fateful tremendous human passion, from
+the reminiscences of an impressive day on their travels in youth; when
+the leaping torrent had struck upon a tale of love they were reading.
+They hurriedly entreated Nesta to command her nerves; peremptorily
+requested her to stay where she was; showed her spontaneously, by way of
+histrionic adjuration, the face to be worn by young ladies at greetings
+on these occasions; kissed her and left her; Virginia whispering: 'He is
+true!'
+
+Dudley entered the drawing-room, charged with his happy burden of a love
+that had passed through the furnace.  She stood near a window, well in
+the light; she hardly gave him welcome.  His address to her was hurried,
+rather uncertain, coherent enough between the drop and the catch of
+articulate syllables.  He found himself holding his hat.  He placed it on
+the table, and it rolled foolishly; but soon he was by her side, having
+two free hands to claim her one.
+
+'You are thinking, you have not heard from me!  I have been much
+occupied,' he said.  'My brother is ill, very ill.  I have your pardon?'
+
+'Indeed you have--if it has to be asked.'
+
+'I have it?'
+
+'Have I to grant it?'
+
+'I own to remissness!
+
+'I did not blame you.'
+
+'Nesta .  .  .  !'
+
+Her coldness was unshaken.
+
+He repeated the call of her name.  'I should have written--I ought to
+have written!--I could not have expressed .  .  .  You do forgive?  So
+many things!'
+
+'You come from Cronidge to-day?'
+
+'From my family--to you.'
+
+She seemed resentful.  His omissions as a correspondent were explicable
+in a sentence.  It had to be deferred.
+
+Reviewing for a moment the enormous internal conflict undergone by him
+during the period of the silence between them, he wondered at the
+vastness of the love which had conquered objections, to him so poignant.
+
+There was at least no seeing of the public blot on her birth when looking
+on her face.  Nor when thinking of the beauty of her character, in
+absence or in presence, was there any.  He had mastered distaste to such
+a degree, that he forgot the assistance he had received from the heiress
+for enabling him to appreciate the fair young girl.  Money is the
+imperious requirement of superior station; and more money and more: in
+these our modern days of the merchant's wealth, and the miner's, and the
+gigantic American and Australian millionaires, high rank is of necessity
+vowed, in peril of utter eclipse; to the possession of money.  Still it
+is, when assured, a consideration far to the rear with a gentleman in
+whose bosom love and the buzzing world have fought their battle out.  He
+could believe it thoroughly fought out, by the prolonged endurance of a
+contest lasting many days and nights; in the midst of which, at one time,
+the task of writing to tell her of his withdrawal from the engagement,
+was the cause of his omission to write.
+
+As to her character, he dwelt on the charm of her recovered features, to
+repress an indicative dread of some intrepid force behind it, that might
+be unfeminine, however gentle the external lineaments.  Her features, her
+present aristocratic deficiency of colour, greatly pleased him; her
+character would submit to moulding.  Of all young ladies in the world,
+she should be the one to shrink from a mental independence and hold to
+the guidance of the man ennobling her.  Did she?  Her eyes were reading
+him.  She had her father's limpid eyes, and when they concentrated rays,
+they shot.
+
+'Have you seen my parents, Mr. Sowerby?'
+
+He answered smilingly, for reassuringly: 'I have seen them.'
+
+'My mother?'
+
+'From your mother first.  But am I not to be Dudley?'
+
+'She spoke to you?  She told you?'
+
+'And yesterday your father--a second time.'
+
+Some remainder of suspicion in the dealing with members of this family,
+urged Dudley to say: 'I understood from them, you were not? .  .  . that
+you were quite .  .  .?'
+
+'I have heard: I have guessed: it was recently--this morning, as it
+happened.  I wish to go to my mother to-day.  I shall go to her
+to-morrow.'
+
+'I might offer to conduct you-now!'
+
+'You are kind; I have Skepsey.'  She relieved the situation of its
+cold-toned strain in adding: 'He is a host.'
+
+'But I may come?--now!  Have I not the right?  You do not deny it me?'
+
+'You are very generous.'
+
+'I claim the right, then.  Always.  And subsequently, soon after, my
+mother hopes to welcome you at Cronidge.  She will be glad to hear of
+your naming of a day.  My father bids me .  .  .  he and all our family.'
+
+'They are very generous.'
+
+'I may send them word this evening of a day you name?'
+
+'No, Mr. Sowerby.
+
+'Dudley?'
+
+'I cannot say it.  I have to see my parents.'
+
+'Between us, surely?'
+
+'My whole heart thanks you for your goodness to me.  I am unable to say
+more.'
+
+He had again observed and he slightly crisped under the speculative look
+she directed on him: a simple unstrained look, that had an air of reading
+right in, and was worse to bear with than when the spark leaped upon some
+thought from her eyes: though he had no imagination of anything he
+concealed--or exposed, and he would have set it down to her temporary
+incredulousness of his perfect generosity or power to overcome the
+world's opinion of certain circumstances.  That had been a struggle!
+The peculiar look was not renewed.  She spoke warmly of her gratitude.
+She stated, that she must of necessity see her parents at once.  She
+submitted to his entreaty to conduct her to them on the morrow.  It was
+in the manner of one who yielded step by step, from inability to contend.
+
+Her attitude continuing unchanged, he became sensible of a monotony
+in the speech with which he assailed it, and he rose to leave, not
+dissatisfied.  She, at his urgent request, named her train for London in
+the early morning.  He said it was not too early.  He would have desired
+to be warmed; yet he liked her the better for the moral sentiment
+controlling the physical.  He had appointments with relatives or
+connections in the town, and on that pretext he departed, hoping for the
+speedy dawn of the morrow as soon as he had turned his back on the house.
+
+No, not he the man to have pity of women underfoot!  That was the
+thought, unrevolved, unphrased, all but unconscious, in Nesta: and while
+her heart was exalting him for his generosity.  Under her present sense
+of the chilling shadow, she felt the comfort there was in being grateful
+to him for the golden beams which his generosity cast about her.  But she
+had an intelligence sharp to pierce, virgin though she was; and with the
+mark in sight, however distant, she struck it, unerring as an Artemis for
+blood of beasts: those shrewd young wits, on the lookout to find a
+champion, athirst for help upon a desolate road, were hard as any
+judicial to pronounce the sentence upon Dudley in that respect.  She
+raised him high; she placed herself low; she had a glimpse of the
+struggle he had gone through; love of her had helped him, she believed.
+And she was melted; and not the less did the girl's implacable intuition
+read with the keenness of eye of a man of the world the blunt division
+in him, where warm humanity stopped short at the wall of social concrete
+forming a part of this rightly esteemed young citizen.  She, too, was
+divided: she was at his feet; and she rebuked herself for daring to
+judge--or rather, it was, for having a reserve in her mind upon a man
+proving so generous with her.  She was pulled this way and that by
+sensibilities both inspiring to blind gratitude and quickening her
+penetrative view.  The certainty of an unerring perception remained.
+
+Dorothea and Virginia were seated in the room below, waiting for their
+carriage, when the hall-door spoke of the Hon. Dudley's departure; soon
+after, Nesta entered to them.  She swam up to Dorothea's lap, and dropped
+her head on it, kneeling.
+
+The ladies feared she might be weeping.  Dorothea patted her thick brown
+twisted locks of hair.  Unhappiness following such an interview, struck
+them as an ill sign.
+
+Virginia bent to the girl's ear, and murmured: 'All well?'
+
+She replied: 'He has been very generous.'
+
+Her speaking of the words renewed an oppression, that had darkened her on
+the descent of stairs.  For sensibilities sharp as Nesta's, are not to be
+had without their penalties: and she who had gone nigh to summing in a
+flash the nature of Dudley, sank suddenly under that affliction often
+besetting the young adventurous mind, crushing to young women:--the
+fascination exercised upon them by a positive adverse masculine attitude
+and opinion.  Young men know well what it is: and if young women have by
+chance overcome their timidity, to the taking of any step out of the trim
+pathway, they shrink, with a sense of forlornest isolation.  It becomes a
+subjugation; inciting to revolt, but a heavy weight to cast off.  Soon it
+assumed its material form for the contention between her and Dudley, in
+the figure of Mrs. Marsett.  The Nesta who had been instructed to know
+herself to be under a shadow, heard, she almost justified Dudley's
+reproaches to her, for having made the acquaintance of the unhappy woman,
+for having visited her, for having been, though but for a minute, at the
+mercy of a coarse gentleman's pursuit.  The recollection was a smart
+buffet.
+
+Her lighted mind punished her thus through her conjuring of Dudley's
+words, should news of her relations with Mrs. Marsett reach him:--and she
+would have to tell him.  Would he not say: 'I have borne with the things
+concerning your family.  All the greater reason why I must insist'--he
+would assuredly say he insisted (her humour caught at the word, as being
+the very word one could foresee and clearly see him uttering in a fit of
+vehemence) on her immediate abandonment of 'that woman.'
+
+And with Nesta's present enlightenment by dusky beams, upon her
+parentage, she listened abjectly to Dudley, or the opinion of the
+majority.  Would he not say or think, that her clinging to Mrs. Marsett
+put them under a kind of common stamp, or gave the world its option to
+class them together?
+
+These were among the ideas chasing in a head destined to be a battle-
+field for the enrichment of a harvest-field of them, while the girl's
+face was hidden on Dorothea's lap, and her breast heaved and heaved.
+
+She distressed them when she rose, by saying she must instantly see her
+mother.
+
+They saw the pain their hesitation inflicted, and Dorothea said: 'Yes,
+dear; any day you like.'
+
+'To-morrow--I must go to her to-morrow!'
+
+A suggestion of her mother's coming down, was faintly spoken by one lady,
+echoed in a quaver by the other.
+
+Nesta shook her head.  To quiet the kind souls, she entreated them to
+give their promise that they would invite her again.
+
+Imagining the Hon. Dudley to have cast her off, both ladies embraced her:
+not entirely yielding-up their hearts to her, by reason of the pernicious
+new ideas now in the world to sap our foundations of morality; which
+warned them of their duty to uphold mentally his quite justifiable
+behaviour, even when compassionating the sufferings of the guiltless
+creature loved by them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+CONTAINS DEEDS UNRELATED AND EXPOSITIONS OF FEELINGS
+
+All through the afternoon and evening Skepsey showed indifference to
+meals by continuing absent: and he was the one with whom Nesta would have
+felt at home; more at home than with her parents.  He and the cool world
+he moved in were a transparency of peace to her mind; even to his giving
+of some portion of it, when she had the dear little man present to her in
+a vivid image of a fish in a glass globe, wandering round and round, now
+and then shooting across, just as her Skepsey did: he carried his head
+semihorizontally at his arrowy pace; plain to read though he was, he
+appeared, under that image created of him, animated by motives inducing
+to speculation.
+
+She thought of him till she could have reproached him for not returning
+and helping her to get away from the fever of other thoughts:--this
+anguish twisting about her parents, and the dreadful trammels of
+gratitude to a man afflictingly generous, the frown of congregated
+people.
+
+The latter was the least of evils; she had her charges to bring against
+them for injustice: uncited, unstirred charges, they were effective as a
+muffled force to sustain her: and the young who are of healthy lively
+blood and clean conscience have either emotion or imagination to fold
+them defensively from an enemy world; whose power to drive them forth
+into the wilderness they acknowledge.  But in the wilderness their souls
+are not beaten down by breath of mortals; they burn straight flame there
+up to the parent Spirit.
+
+She could not fancy herself flying thither;--where to be shorn and naked
+and shivering is no hardship, for the solitude clothes, and the sole true
+life in us resolves to that steady flame;--she was restrained by Dudley's
+generosity, which held her fast to have the forgiveness for her
+uncommitted sin dashed in her face.  He surprised her; the unexpected
+quality in him seemed suddenly to have snared her fast: and she did not
+obtain release after seeing behind it;--seeing it, by the light of what
+she demanded, personal, shallow, a lover's generosity.  So her keen
+intellect saw it; and her young blood (for the youthful are thus divided)
+thrilled in thinking it must be love!  The name of the sacred passion
+lifted it out of the petty cabin of the individual into a quiring
+cathedral universal, and subdued her.  It subdued her with an unwelcome
+touch of tenderness when she thought of it as involving tenderness for
+her mother, some chivalrous respect for her mother.  Could he love the
+daughter without some little, which a more intimate knowledge of her dear
+mother would enlarge?  The girl's heart flew to her mother, clung to her,
+vindicated her dumbly.  It would not inquire, and it refused to hear,
+hungering the while.  She sent forth her flights of stories in
+elucidation of the hidden; and they were like white bird after bird
+winging to covert beneath a thundercloud; until her breast ached for the
+voice of the thunder: harsh facts: sure as she was of her never losing
+her filial hold of the beloved.  She and her mother grew together, they
+were one.  Accepting the shadow, they were the closer one beneath it.
+She had neither vision nor active thought of her father, in whom her
+pride was.
+
+At the hour of ten, the ladies retired for the enjoyment of their sweet
+reward.  Manton, their maid, came down to sit with Nesta on the watch for
+Skepsey.  Perrin, the footman, returning, as late as twenty minutes to
+eleven, from his tobacco promenade along the terrace, reported to Manton
+'a row in town'; and he repeated to Nesta the policeman's opinion and his
+own of the 'Army' fellows, and the way to treat them.  Both were for
+rigour.
+
+'The name of "Army" attracts poor Skepsey so, I am sure he would join it,
+if they would admit him,' Nesta said.
+
+'He has an immense respect for a young woman, who belongs to his "Army";
+and one doesn't know what may have come,' said Manton.
+
+Two or three minutes after eleven, a feeble ring at the bell gained
+admission for some person: whispering was heard in the passage.
+
+Manton played eavesdropper, and suddenly bursting on Skepsey, arrested
+him when about to dash upstairs.  His young mistress's voice was a
+sufficient command; he yielded; he pitched a smart sigh and stepped
+into her presence for his countenance to be seen, or the show of a
+countenance, that it presented.
+
+'Skepsey wanted to rush to bed without saying good night to me?' said
+she; leaving unnoticed, except for woefulness of tone, his hurried
+shuffle of remarks on 'his appearance,' and 'little accidents'; ending
+with an inclination of his disgraceful person to the doorway, and a
+petition: 'If I might, Miss Nesta?'  The implied pathetic reference to a
+surgically-treated nose under a cross of strips of plaster, could not
+obtain dismissal for him.  And he had one eye of sinister hue, showing
+beside its lighted-grey fellow as if a sullen punished dragonwhelp had
+couched near some quick wood-pigeon.  The two eyes blinked rapidly.  He
+was a picture of Guilt in the nude, imploring to be sent into
+concealment.
+
+The cruelty of detaining him was evident.
+
+'Yes, if you must,' Nesta said.  'But, dear Skepsey, will it be the
+magistrate again to-morrow?'
+
+He feared it would be; he fancied it would needs be.  He concluded
+by stating, that he was bound to appear before the magistrate in the
+morning; and he begged assistance to keep it from the knowledge of the
+Miss Duvidneys, who had been so kind to him.
+
+'Has there been bailing of you again, Skepsey?'
+
+'A good gentleman, a resident,' he replied; 'a military gentleman;
+indeed, a colonel of the cavalry; but, it may so be, retired; and anxious
+about our vast possessions; though he thinks a translation of a French
+attack on England unimportant.  He says, the Germans despise us most.'
+
+'Then this gentleman thinks you have a good case?'
+
+'He is a friend of Captain Dartrey's.'
+
+Hearing that name, Nesta said: 'Now, Skepsey, you must tell me
+everything.  You are not to mind your looks.  I believe, I do always
+believe you mean well.'
+
+'Miss Nesta, it depends upon the magistrate's not being prejudiced
+against the street-processionists!
+
+'But you may expect justice from the magistrate, if your case is good?'
+
+'I would not say no, Miss Nesta.  But we find, the opinion of the public
+has its effect with magistrates--their sentences.  They are severe on
+boxing.  They have latterly treated the "Army" with more consideration,
+owing to the change in the public view.  I myself have changed.'
+
+'Have you joined it?'
+
+'I cannot say I am a member of it.'
+
+'You walked in the ranks to-day, and you were maltreated?  Your friend
+was there?'
+
+'I walked with Matilda Pridden; that is, parallel, along the pavement.'
+
+'I hope she came out of it unhurt?'
+
+'It is thanks to Captain Dartrey, Miss Nesta?'
+
+This time Nesta looked her question.
+
+Manton interposed: 'You are to speak, Mr. Skepsey'; and she stopped a
+flood of narrative, that was knocking in his mind to feel its head and to
+leap--an uninterrupted half-minute more would have shaped the story for
+the proper flow.
+
+He began, after attending to the throb of his bruises in a manner to
+correct them rather than solace; and the beginning was the end: 'Captain
+Dartrey rescued us, before Matilda Pridden suffered harm, to mention--the
+chin, slight, teeth unshaken; a beautiful set.  She is angry with Captain
+Dartrey, for having recourse to violence in her defence: it is against
+her principles.  "Then you die," she says; and our principles are to gain
+more by death.  She says, we are alive in them; but worse if we abandon
+them for the sake of living.--I am a little confused; she is very
+abstruse.--Because, that is the corruptible life, she says.  I have found
+it quite impossible to argue with her; she has always a complete answer;
+wonderful.  In case of Invasion, we are to lift our voices to the Lord;
+and the Lord's will shall be manifested.  If we are robbed, we ask, How
+came we by the goods?  It is unreasonable; it strikes at rights of
+property.  But I have to go on thinking.  When in danger, she sings
+without excitement.  When the blow struck her, she stopped singing only
+an instant.  She says, no one fears, who has real faith.  She will not
+let me call her brave.  She cannot admire Captain Dartrey.  Her
+principles are opposed.  She said to him, "Sir, you did what seemed to
+you right."  She thinks every blow struck sends us back to the state of
+the beasts.  Her principles .  .  .'
+
+'How was it Captain Dartrey happened to be present, Skepsey?'
+
+'She is very firm.  You cannot move her.--Captain Dartrey was on his way
+to the station, to meet a gentleman from London, Miss Nesta.  He carried
+a stick--a remarkable stick--he had shown to me in the morning, and he
+has given it me now.  He says, he has done his last with it.  He seems to
+have some of Matilda Pridden's ideas about fighting, when it's over.  He
+was glad to be rid of the stick, he said.'
+
+'But who attacked you?  What were the people?'
+
+'Captain Dartrey says, England may hold up her head while she breeds
+young women like Matilda Pridden: right or wrong, he says: it is the
+substance.'
+
+Hereupon Manton, sick of Miss Pridden, shook the little man with a
+snappish word, to bring him to attention.  She got him together
+sufficiently for him to give a lame version of the story; flat until he
+came to his heroine's behaviour, when he brightened a moment, and he sank
+back absorbed in her principles and theories of life.  It was understood
+by Nesta, that the processionists, going at a smart pace, found their way
+blocked and were assaulted in one of the sidestreets; and that Skepsey
+rushed to the defence of Matilda Pridden; and that, while they were
+engaged, Captain Dartrey was passing at the end of the street, and
+recognized one he knew in the thick of it and getting the worst of it,
+owing to numbers.  'I will show you the stick he did it with, Miss
+Nests'; said Skepsey, regardless of narrative; and darted out of the room
+to bring in the Demerara supple-jack; holding which, he became inspired
+to relate something of Captain Dartrey's deeds.
+
+They gave no pleasure to his young lady, as he sadly perceived:--thus it
+is with the fair sex ever, so fond of heroes!  She shut her eyes from the
+sight of the Demerara supple-jack descending right and left upon the
+skulls of a couple of bully lads.  'That will do--you were rescued.  And
+now go to bed, Skepsey; and be up at seven to breakfast with me,' Nesta
+said, for his battle-damaged face would be more endurable to behold after
+an interval, she hoped; and she might in the morning dissociate its evil
+look from the deeds of Captain Dartrey.
+
+The thought of her hero taking active part in a streetfray, was repulsive
+to her; it swamped his brilliancy.  And this distressed her, by
+withdrawing the support which the thought of him had been to her since
+mid-day.  She lay for sleepless hours, while nursing a deeper pain, under
+oppression of repugnance to battle-dealing, bloodshedding men.  It was
+long before she grew mindful of the absurdity of the moan recurring
+whenever reflection wearied.  Translated into speech, it would have run:
+
+'In a street of the town! with a stick!'--The vulgar picture pursued her
+to humiliation; it robbed her or dimmed her possession of the one bright
+thing she had remaining to her.  So she deemed it during the heavy sighs
+of night; partly conscious, that in some strange way it was as much as
+tossing her to the man who never could have condescended to the
+pugnacious using of a stick in a street.  He, on the contrary, was a
+cover to the shamefaced.
+
+Her heart was weak that night.  She hovered above it, but not so detached
+as to scorn it for fawning to one--any one--who would offer her and her
+mother a cover from scorn.  And now she exalted Dudley's generosity, now
+clung to a low idea of a haven in her father's wealth; and she was
+unaware, that the second mood was deduced from the first.  She did know
+herself cowardly: she had, too, a critic in her clear head, to spurn at
+the creature who could think of purchasing the world's respect.  Dudley's
+generosity sprang up to silence the voice.  She could praise him, on a
+review of it, for delicacy, moreover; and the delicacy laid her under a
+more positive obligation.  Her sense of it was not without a toneless
+quaint faint savour of the romantic, that her humour little humorously
+caught at, to paint her a picture of former heroes of fiction, who win
+their trying lady by their perfection of good conduct on a background of
+high birth; and who are not seen to be wooden before the volume closes.
+Her fatigue of sleeplessness plunged her into the period of poke-bonnets
+and peaky hats to admire him; giving her the kind of sweetness we may
+imagine ourselves to get in the state of tired horse munching hay.  If
+she had gone to her bed with a noble or simply estimable plain image of
+one of her friends in her heart, to sustain it, she would not have been
+thus abject.  Skepsey's discoloured eye, and Captain Dartrey's behaviour
+behind it, threw her upon Dudley's generosity, as being the shield for an
+outcast.  Girls, who see at a time of need their ideal extinguished in
+its appearing tarnished, are very much at the disposal of the pressing
+suitor.  Nesta rose in the black winter morn, summoning the best she
+could think of to glorify Dudley, that she might not feel so doomed.
+
+According to an agreement overnight, she went to the bedroom of Dorothea
+and Virginia, to assure them of her having slept well, and say the good-
+bye to them and their Tasso.  The little dog was the growl of a silken
+ball in a basket.  His mistresses excused him, because of his being
+unused to the appearance of any person save Manton in their bedroom.
+Dorothea, kissing her, said: 'Adieu, dear child; and there is home with
+us always, remember.  And, after breakfast, however it may be, you will,
+for our greater feeling of security, have--she has our orders--Manton--
+your own maid we consider too young for a guardian--to accompany you.
+We will not have it on our consciences, that by any possibility harm came
+to you while you were under our charge.  The good innocent girl we
+received from the hands of your father, we return to him; we are sure of
+that.'
+
+Nesta said: 'Mr. Sowerby promised he would come.'
+
+'However it may be,' Dorothea repeated her curtaining phrase.
+
+Virginia put in a word of apology for Tasso's temper he enjoyed
+ordinarily a slumber of half an hour's longer duration.  He was, Dorothea
+feelingly added, regularity itself.  Virginia murmured: 'Except once!'
+and both were appalled by the recollection of that night.  It had,
+nevertheless, caused them to reperuse the Rev. Stuart Rem's published
+beautiful sermon ON DIRT; the words of which were an antidote to the
+night of Tasso in the nostrils of Mnemosyne; so that Dorothea could reply
+to her sister, slightly by way of a reproval, quoting Mr. Stuart Rem at
+his loftiest: '"Let us not bring into the sacred precincts Dirt from the
+roads, but have a care to spread it where it is a fructification."'
+Virginia produced the sequent sentence, likewise weighty.  Nesta stood
+between the thin division of their beds, her right hand given to one, her
+left to the other.  They had the semblance of a haven out of storms.
+
+She reflected, after shutting the door of their room, that the residing
+with them had been a means of casting her--it was an effort to remember
+how--upon the world where the tree of knowledge grows.  She had eaten;
+and she might be the worse for it; but she was raised to a height that
+would not let her look with envy upon peace and comfort.  Luxurious quiet
+people were as ripening glass-house fruits.  Her bitter gathering of the
+knowledge of life had sharpened her intellect; and the intellect, even in
+the young, is, and not less usefully, hard metal rather than fallow soil.
+But for the fountain of human warmth at her breast, she might have
+been snared by the conceit of intellect, to despise the simple and
+conventional, or shed the pity which is charity's contempt.  She had
+only to think of the kindness of the dear good ladies; her heart jumped
+to them at once.  And when she fancied hearing those innocent souls of
+women embracing her and reproaching her for the knowledge of life she now
+bore, her words down deep in her bosom were: It has helped me to bear the
+shock of other knowledge!  How would she have borne it before she knew of
+the infinitely evil?  Saving for the tender compassion weeping over her
+mother, she had not much acute personal grief.
+
+For this world condemning her birth, was the world tolerant of that
+infinitely evil!  Her intellect fortified her to be combative by day,
+after the night of imagination; which splendid power is not so
+serviceable as the logical mind in painful seasons: for night revealed
+the world snorting Dragon's breath at a girl guilty of knowing its
+vilest.  More than she liked to recall, it had driven her scorched, half
+withered, to the shelter of Dudley.  The daylight, spreading thin at the
+windows, restored her from that weakness.  'We will quit England,' she
+said, thinking of her mother and herself, and then of her father's surely
+following them.  She sighed thankfully, half way through the breakfast
+with Skepsey, at sight of the hour by the clock; she was hurriedly
+sentient of the puzzle of her feelings, when she guessed at a chance that
+Dudley would be delayed.  She supposed herself as possibly feeling not so
+well able to keep every thought of her head brooding on her mother in
+Dudley's company.
+
+Skepsey's face was just sufferable by light of day, if one pitied
+reflecting on his honest intentions; it ceased to discolour another.
+He dropped a few particulars of his hero in action; but the heroine
+eclipsed.  He was heavier than ever with his Matilda Pridden.  At the
+hour for departure, Perrin had a conveyance at the door.  Nesta sent off
+Skepsey with a complimentary message to Captain Dartrey.  Her maid Mary
+begged her to finish her breakfast; Manton suggested the waiting a
+further two or three minutes.  'We must not be late,' Nesta said; and
+when the minute-hand of the clock marked ample time for the drive to the
+station, she took her seat and started, keeping her face resolutely set
+seaward, having at her ears the ring of a cry that was to come from
+Manton.  But Manton was dumb; she spied no one on the pavement who
+signalled to stop them.  And no one was at the station to greet them.
+They stepped into a carriage where they were alone.  Dudley with his
+dreaded generosity melted out of Nesta's thoughts, like the vanishing
+steam-wreath on the dip between the line and the downs.
+
+She passed into music, as she always did under motion of carriages and
+trains, whether in happiness or sadness: and the day being one that had a
+sky, the scenic of music swung her up to soar.  None of her heavy burdens
+enchained, though she knew the weight of them, with those of other
+painful souls.  The pipeing at her breast gave wings to large and small
+of the visible; and along the downs went stateliest of flowing dances;
+a copse lengthened to forest; a pool of cattle-water caught grey for
+flights through enchantment.  Cottage-children, wherever seen in groups,
+she wreathed above with angels to watch them.  Her mind all the while was
+busy upon earth, embracing her mother, eyeing her father.  Imagination
+and our earthly met midway, and still she flew, until she was brought to
+the ground by a shot.  She struggled to rise, uplifting Judith Marsett: a
+woman not so very much older than her own teens, in the count of years,
+and ages older; and the world pulling at her heels to keep her low.  That
+unhappiest had no one but a sisterly girl to help her: and how she clung
+to the slender help!  Who else was there?
+
+The good and the bad in the woman struck separate blows upon the
+girl's resonant nature.  She perceived the good, and took it into her
+reflections.  The bad she divined: it approached like some threat of
+inflammation.  Natures resonant as that which animated this girl, are
+quick at the wells of understanding: and she had her intimations of the
+world's wisdom in withholding contagious presences from the very mangy of
+the young, who may not have an, aim, or ideal or strong human compassion,
+for a preservative.  She was assured of her possessing it.  She asked
+herself in her mother's voice, and answered mutely.  She had the
+certainty: for she rebuked the slavish feverishness of the passion,
+as betrayed by Mrs. Marsett; and the woman's tone, as of strung wires
+ringing on a rage of the wind.  Then followed her cry for the man who
+could speak to Captain Marsett of his duty in honour.  An image of one,
+accompanying the faster beats of her heart, beguiled her to think away
+from the cause.  He, the one man known to her, would act the brother's
+part on behalf of the hapless creature.
+
+Nesta just imagined her having supplicated him, and at once imagination
+came to dust.  She had to thank him she knelt to him.  For the first time
+of her life she found herself seized with her sex's shudder in the blood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+IN WHICH AGAIN WE MAKE USE OF THE OLD LAMPS FOR LIGHTING AN ABYSMAL
+DARKNESS
+
+And if Nesta had looked out of her carriage-window soon after the train
+began to glide, her eagle of imagination would have reeled from the
+heights, with very different feelings, earlier, perhaps a captive, at
+sight of the tardy gentleman rushing along the platform, and bending ear
+to the footman Perrin, and staring for one lost.
+
+The snaky tail of the train imparted to Dudley an apprehension of the
+ominous in his having missed her.  It wound away, and left regrets, which
+raised a chorus of harsh congratulations from the opposite party of his
+internal parliament.
+
+Neither party could express an opinion without rousing the other to an
+uproar.
+
+He had met his cousin Southweare overnight.  He had heard, that there was
+talk of Miss Radnor.  Her name was in the mouth of Major Worrell.  It was
+coupled with the name of Mrs. Marsett.  A military captain, in the
+succession to be Sir Edward Marsett, bestowed on her the shadow of his
+name.
+
+It could be certified, that Miss Radnor visited the woman at her house.
+What are we to think of Miss Radnor, save that daughters of depraved
+parents!  .  .  .  A torture undeserved is the Centaur's shirt for
+driving us to lay about in all directions.  He who had swallowed so much
+--a thunderbolt: a still undigested discharge from the perplexing heavens
+jumped frantic under the pressure upon him of more, and worse.  A girl
+getting herself talked of at a Club!  And she of all young ladies should
+have been the last to draw round her that buzz of tongues.  On such a
+subject!--The parents pursuing their career of cynical ostentation in
+London, threw an evil eye of heredity on their offspring in the egg;
+making anything credible, pointing at tendencies.
+
+An alliance with her was impossible.  So said disgust.  Anger came like a
+stronger beast, and extinguished the safety there was in the thing it
+consumed, by growing so excessive as to require tempering with drops of
+compassion; which prepared the way for a formal act of cold forgiveness;
+and the moment that was conceived, he had a passion to commit the
+horrible magnanimity, and did it on a grand scale, and dissolved his
+Heart in the grandeur, and slaved himself again.
+
+Far from expungeing the doubt of her, forgiveness gave it a stamp and an
+edge.  His renewed enslavement set him perusing his tyrant keenly, as
+nauseated captives do; and he saw, that forgiveness was beside the case.
+For this Nesta Victoria Radnor would not crave it or accept it.  He had
+mentally played the woman to her superior vivaciousness too long for him
+to see her taking a culprit's attitude.  What she did, she intended to
+do.  The mother would not have encouraged her.  The father idolized her;
+and the father was a frank hedonist, whose blood .  .  .  speculation on
+horseback gallops to barren extremes.  Eyes like hers--if there had not
+been the miserable dupes of girls!  Conduct is the sole guide to female
+character.  That likewise may be the hypocrite's mask.
+
+Popular artists, intent to gratify the national taste for effects called
+realistic, have figured in scenes of battle the raying fragments of a man
+from impact of a cannon-ball on his person.  Truly thus it may be when
+flesh contends.  But an image of the stricken and scattered mind of the
+man should, though deficient in the attraction, have a greater
+significance, forasmuch as it does not exhibit him entirely liquefied and
+showered into space; it leaves him his legs for the taking of further
+steps.  Dudley, standing on the platform of Nesta's train, one half
+minute too late, according to his desire before he put himself in motion,
+was as wildly torn as the vapour shredded streaming to fingers and
+threads off the upright columnar shot of the shriek from the boiler.
+He wished every mad antagonism to his wishes: that he might see her, be
+blind to her; embrace, discard; heal his wound, and tear it wider.  He
+thanked her for the grossness of an offence precluding excuses.  He was
+aware of a glimmer of advocacy in the very grossness.  He conjured-up her
+features, and they said, her innocence was the sinner; they scoffed at
+him for the dupe he was willing to be.  She had enigma's mouth, with the
+eyes of morning.
+
+More than most girls, she was the girl-Sphinx to him because of her
+having ideas--or what he deemed ideas.  She struck a toneing warmth
+through his intelligence, not dissimilar to the livelier circulation of
+the blood in the frame breathing mountain air.  She really helped him,
+incited him to go along with this windy wild modern time more cheerfully,
+if not quite hopefully.  For she had been the book of Romance he despised
+when it appeared as a printed volume: and which might have educated the
+young man to read some among our riddles in the book of humanity.  The
+white he was ready to take for silver the black were all black; the
+spotted had received corruption's label.  Her youthful French governess
+Mademoiselle de Seilles was also peculiarly enigmatic at the mouth
+conversant, one might expect, with the disintegrating literature of her
+country.  In public, the two talked of St. Louis.  One of them in secret
+visits a Mrs. Marsett.  The Southweare women, the Hennen women, and Lady
+Evelina Reddish, were artless candid creatures in their early days, not
+transgressing in a glance.  Lady Grace Halley had her fit of the
+devotional previous to marriage.  No girl known to Dudley by report or
+acquaintance had committed so scandalous an indiscretion as Miss
+Radnor's: it pertained to the insolently vile.
+
+And on that ground, it started the voluble defence.  For certain
+suspected things will dash suspicion to the rebound, when they are very
+dark.  As soon as the charge against her was moderated, the defence
+expired.  He heard the world delivering its judgement upon her; and he
+sorrowfully acquiesced.  She passed from him.
+
+When she was cut off, she sang him in the distance a remembered saying
+of hers, with the full melody of her voice.  One day, treating of modern
+pessimism, he had draped a cadaverous view of our mortal being in a
+quotation of the wisdom of the Philosopher Emperor: 'To set one's love
+upon the swallow is a futility.'  And she, weighing it, nodded, and
+replied: 'May not the pleasure for us remain if we set our love upon the
+beauty of the swallow's flight?'
+
+There was, for a girl, a bit of idea, real idea, in that meaning, of
+course, the picture we are to have of the bird's wings in motion, it has
+often been admired.  Oh! not much of an idea in itself: feminine and
+vague.  But it was pertinent, opportune; in this way she stimulated.
+And the girl who could think it, and call on a Mrs. Marsett, was of the
+class of mixtures properly to be handed over to chemical experts for
+analysis!
+
+She had her aspirations on behalf of her sex: she and Mademoiselle de
+Seilles discussed them; women were to do this, do that:--necessarily a
+means of instructing a girl to learn what they did do.  If the lower part
+of her face had been as reassuring to him as the upper, he might have put
+a reluctant faith in the pure-mindedness of these aspirations, without
+reverting to her origin, and also to recent rumours of her father and
+Lady Grace Halley.  As it was, he inquired of the cognizant, whether an
+intellectual precocity, devoted by preference to questions affecting the
+state of women, did not rather more than suggest the existence of urgent
+senses likewise.  She, a girl under twenty, had an interest in public
+matters, and she called on a Mrs. Marsett.  To plead her simplicity, was
+to be absolutely ignorant of her.
+
+He neighboured sagacity when he pointed that interrogation relating to
+Nesta's precociousness of the intelligence.  For, as they say in
+dactylomancy, the 'psychical' of women are not disposed in their
+sensitive early days to dwell upon the fortunes of their sex: a thought
+or two turns them facing away, with the repugnant shiver.  They worship
+at a niche in the wall.  They cannot avoid imputing some share of
+foulness to them that are for scouring the chamber; and the civilized
+male, keeping his own chamber locked, quite shares their pale taper's
+view.  The full-blooded to the finger-tips, on the other hand, are likely
+to be drawn to the subject, by noble inducement as often as by base:
+Nature at flood being the cause in either instance.  This young Nature of
+the good and the bad, is the blood which runs to power of heart as well
+as to thirsts of the flesh.  Then have men to sound themselves, to
+discover how much of Nature their abstract honourable conception or
+representative eidolon of young women will bear without going to pieces;
+and it will not be much, unless they shall have taken instruction from
+the poet's pen: for a view possibly of Nature at work to cast the slough,
+when they see her writhing as in her ugliest old throes.  If they have
+learnt of Nature's priest to respect her, they will less distrust those
+rare daughters of hers who are moved by her warmth to lift her out of
+slime.  It is by her own live warmth that it has to be done: cold worship
+at a niche in the wall will not do it.--Well, there is an index, for the
+enlargement of your charity.
+
+But facts were Dudley's teachers.  Physically, morally, mentally,
+he read the world through facts; that is to say, through the facts he
+encountered: and he was in consequence foredoomed to a succession of
+bumps; all the heavier from his being, unlike the horned kind, not
+unimpressible by the hazy things outside his experience.  Even at his
+darkest over Nesta, it was his indigestion of the misconduct of her
+parents, which denied to a certain still small advocate within him the
+right to raise a voice: that good fellow struck the attitude for
+pleading, and had to be silent; for he was Instinct; at best a stammering
+speaker in the Court of the wigged Facts.  Instinct of this Nesta
+Radnor's character would have said a brave word, but for her deeds
+bearing witness to her inheritance of a lawlessly adventurous
+temperament.
+
+What to do?  He was no nearer to an answer when the wintry dusk had
+fallen on the promenading crowds.  To do nothing, is the wisdom of those
+who have seen fools perish.  Facts had not taught him, that the doing
+nothing, for a length of days after the first shock he sustained, was the
+reason of how it came that Nesta knitted closer her acquaintance with the
+'agreeable lady' she mentioned in her letter to Cronidge.  Those
+excellent counsellors of a mercantile community gave him no warnings,
+that the 'masterly inactive' part, so greatly esteemed by him for the
+conduct of public affairs, might be perilous in dealings with a vivid
+girl: nor a hint, that when facts continue undigested, it is because the
+sensations are as violent as hysterical females to block them from the
+understanding. His Robin Goodfellow instinct tried to be serviceable at a
+crux of his meditations, where Edith Averst's consumptive brothers waved
+faded hands at her chances of inheriting largely.  Superb for the
+chances: but what of her offspring?  And the other was a girl such as the
+lusty Dame Dowager of fighting ancestors would have signalled to the heir
+of the House's honours for the perpetuation of his race.  No doubt: and
+the venerable Dame (beautiful in her old-lace frame, or say foliage) of
+the Ages backward, temp: Ed: III. inflated him with a thought of her: and
+his readings in modern books on heredity, pure blood, physical
+regeneration, pronounced approval of Nesta Radnor: and thereupon instinct
+opened mouth to speak; and a lockjaw seized it under that scowl of his
+presiding mistrust of Nature.
+
+He clung to his mistrust the more because of a warning he had from the
+silenced natural voice: somewhat as we may behold how the Conservatism of
+a Class, in a world of all the evidences showing that there is no stay to
+things, comes of the intuitive discernment of its finality.  His mistrust
+was his own; and Nesta was not; not yet; though a step would make her his
+own.  Instinct prompting to the step, was a worthless adviser.  It
+spurred him, nevertheless.
+
+He called at the Club for his cousin Southweare, with whom he was not in
+sympathy; and had information that, Southweare said, 'made the girl out
+all right.'  Girls in these days do things which the sainted stay-at-
+homes preceding them would not have dreamed of doing.  Something had
+occurred, relating to Major Worrell: he withdrew Miss Radnor's name,
+acknowledged himself mistaken or amended his report of her, in some way,
+not quite intelligible.  Dudley was accosted by Simeon Fenellan;
+subsequently by Dartrey.  There was gossip over the latter gentleman's
+having been up before the magistrate, talk of a queer kind of stick, and
+Dartrey said, laughing, to Simeon: 'Rather lucky I bled the rascal';--
+whatever the meaning.  She nursed one of her adorations for this man, who
+had yesterday, apparently, joined in a street-fray; so she partook of the
+stain of the turbid defacing all these disorderly people.
+
+At his hotel at breakfast the next morning, a newspaper furnished an
+account of Captain Dartrey Fenellan's participation in the strife, after
+mention of him as nephew of the Earl of Clanconan, 'now a visitor to our
+town'; and his deeds were accordant with his birth.  Such writing was
+enough to send Dudley an eager listener to Colney Durance.  What a
+people!
+
+Mr. Dartrey Fenellan's card compelled Dudley presently to receive him.
+
+Dartrey, not debarred by considerations, that an allusion to Miss Radnor
+could be conveyed only in the most delicately obscure manner, spared him
+no more than the plain English of his relations with her.  Requested to
+come to the Club, at a certain hour of the afternoon, that he might hear
+Major Worrell's personal contradiction of scandal involving the young
+lady's name, together with his apology, etc., Dudley declined: and he was
+obliged to do it curtly; words were wanting.  They are hard to find for
+wounded sentiments rendered complex by an infusion of policy.  His
+present mood, with the something new to digest, held the going to Major
+Worrell a wrong step; he behaved as if the speaking to Dartrey Fenellan
+pledged him hardly less.  And besides he had a physical abhorrence, under
+dictate of moral reprobation, of the broad-shouldered sinewy man, whose
+look of wiry alertness pictured the previous day's gory gutters.
+
+Dartrey set sharp eyes on him for an instant, bowed; and went.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+All of us an ermined owl within us to sit in judgement
+Cannot be any goodness unless it is a practiced goodness
+Eminently servile is the tolerated lawbreaker
+Half designingly permitted her trouble to be seen
+Happy the woman who has not more to speak
+If we are robbed, we ask, How came we by the goods?
+Let but the throb be kept for others--That is the one secret
+Love must needs be an egoism
+Not to go hunting and fawning for alliances
+Portrait of himself by the artist
+Put into her woman's harness of the bit and the blinkers
+Share of foulness to them that are for scouring the chamber
+She disdained to question the mouth which had bitten her
+The face of a stopped watch
+The worst of it is, that we remember
+To do nothing, is the wisdom of those who have seen fools perish
+We have come to think we have a claim upon her gratitude
+Whimpering fits you said we enjoy and must have in books
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of One Our Conquerors, v4
+by George Meredith
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS
+
+By GEORGE MEREDITH
+
+1897
+
+
+
+BOOK 5.
+
+XXXVI.    NESTA AND HER FATHER
+XXXVII.   THE MOTHER--THE DAUGHTER
+XXXVIII.  NATALY, NESTA, AND DARTREY FENELLAN
+XXXIX.    A CHAPTER IN THE SHADOW OF MRS. MARSETT
+XL.       AN EXPIATION
+XLI.      THE NIGHT OF THE GREAT UNDELIVERED SPEECH
+XLII.     THE LAST
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+NESTA AND HER FATHER
+
+The day of Nesta's return was one of a number of late when Victor was
+robbed of his walk Westward by Lady Grace Halley, who seduced his
+politeness with her various forms of blandishment to take a seat in her
+carriage; and she was a practical speaker upon her quarter of the world
+when she had him there.  Perhaps she was right in saying--though she had
+no right to say--that he and she together might have the world under
+their feet.  It was one of those irritating suggestions which expedite us
+up to a bald ceiling, only to make us feel the gas-bladder's tight
+extension upon emptiness: It moved him to examine the poor value of his
+aim, by tying him to the contemptible means: One estimate involved the
+other, whichever came first.  Somewhere he had an idea, that would lift
+and cleanse all degradations.  But it did seem as if he were not
+enjoying: things pleasant enough in the passage of them were barren, if
+not prickly, in the retrospect.
+
+He sprang out at the head of the park, for a tramp round it, in the gloom
+of the girdle of lights, to recover his deadened relish of the thin
+phantasmal strife to win an intangible prize.  His dulled physical system
+asked, as with the sensations of a man at the start from sleep in the
+hurrying grip of steam, what on earth he wanted to get, and what was the
+substance of his gains: what! if other than a precipitous intimacy, a
+deep crumbling over deeper, with a little woman amusing him in remarks of
+a whimsical nudity; hardly more.  Nay, not more!  he said; and at the end
+of twenty paces, he saw much more; the campaign gathered a circling
+suggestive brilliancy, like the lamps about the winter park; the Society,
+lured with glitter, hooked by greed, composed a ravishing picture; the
+little woman was esteemed as a serviceable lieutenant; and her hand was
+a small soft one, agreeable to fondle--and avaunt!  But so it is in war:
+we must pay for our allies.  What if it had been, that he and she
+together, with their united powers .  .  . ?  He dashed the silly vision
+aside, as vainer than one of the bubble-empires blown by boys; and it
+broke, showing no heart in it.  His heart was Nataly's.
+
+Let Colney hint his worst; Nataly bore the strain, always did bear any
+strain coming in the round of her duties: and if she would but walk,
+or if she danced at parties, she would scatter the fits of despondency
+besetting the phlegmatic, like this day's breeze the morning fog; or as
+he did with two minutes of the stretch of legs.
+
+Full of the grandeur of that black pit of the benighted London, with its
+ocean-voice of the heart at beat along the lighted outer ring, Victor
+entered at his old door of the two houses he had knocked into one: a
+surprise for Fredi!--and heard that his girl had arrived in the morning.
+
+'And could no more endure her absence from her Mammy O!' The songful
+satirical line spouted in him, to be flung at his girl, as he ran
+upstairs to the boudoir off the drawing-room.
+
+He peeped in.  It was dark.  Sensible of presences, he gradually
+discerned a thick blot along the couch to the right of the door, and he
+drew near.  Two were lying folded together; mother and daughter.  He bent
+over them.  His hand was taken and pressed by Fredi's; she spoke; she
+said tenderly: 'Father.'  Neither of the two made a movement.  He heard
+the shivering rise of a sob, that fell.  The dry sob going to the waste
+breath was Nataly's.  His girl did not speak again.
+
+He left them.  He had no thought until he stood in his dressing-room,
+when he said 'Good!' For those two must have been lying folded together
+during the greater part of the day: and it meant, that the mother's heart
+had opened; the girl knew.  Her tone: 'Father,' sweet, was heavy, too,
+with the darkness it came out of.
+
+So she knew.  Good.  He clasped them both in his heart; tempering his
+pity of those dear ones with the thought, that they were of the sex
+which finds enjoyment in a day of the mutual tear; and envying them;
+he strained at a richness appearing in the sobs of their close union.
+
+All of his girl's loving soul flew to her mother; and naturally: She
+would not be harsh on her father.  She would say he loved!  And true:
+he did love, he does love; loves no woman but the dear mother.
+
+He flicked a short wring of the hand having taken pressure from an alien
+woman's before Fredi pressed it, and absolved himself in the act;
+thinking, How little does a woman know how true we can be to her when we
+smell at a flower here and there!--There they are, stationary; women the
+flowers, we the bee; and we are faithful in our seeming volatility;
+faithful to the hive!--And if women are to be stationary, the reasoning
+is not so bad.  Funny, however, if they here and there imitatively spread
+a wing, and treat men in that way?  It is a breach of the convention; we
+pay them our homage, that they may serve as flowers, not to be volatile
+tempters.  Nataly never had been one of the sort: Lady Grace was.  No
+necessity existed for compelling the world to bow to Lady Grace, while on
+behalf of his Nataly he had to .  .  .  Victor closed the curtain over a
+gulf-revealed by an invocation of Nature, and showing the tremendous
+force he partook of so largely, in her motive elements of the devourer.
+Horrid to behold, when we need a gracious presentation of the
+circumstances.  She is a splendid power for as long as we confine her
+between the banks: but she has a passion to discover cracks; and if we
+give her headway, she will find one, and drive at it, and be through,
+uproarious in her primitive licentiousness, unless we labour body and
+soul like Dutchmen at the dam.  Here she was, and not desired, almost
+detested!  Nature detested!  It had come about through the battle for
+Nataly; chiefly through Mrs. Burman's tenacious hold of the filmy thread
+she took for life and was enabled to use as a means for the perversion
+besides bar to the happiness of creatures really living.  We may well
+marvel at the Fates, and tell them they are not moral agents!
+
+Victor's reflections came across Colney Durance, who tripped and stopped
+them.
+
+Dressed with his customary celerity, he waited for Nesta, to show her the
+lighted grand double drawing-room: a further proof of how Fortune
+favoured him: she was to be told, how he one day expressed a wish for
+greater space, and was informed on the next, that the neighbour house was
+being vacated, and the day following he was in treaty for the purchase of
+it; returning from Tyrol, he found his place habitable.
+
+Nesta came.  Her short look at him was fond, her voice not faltering; she
+laid her hand under his arm and walked round the spacious room, praising
+the general design, admiring the porcelain, the ferns, friezes, hangings,
+and the grand piano, the ebony inlaid music-stands, the firegrates and
+plaques, the ottomans, the tone of neutral colour that, as in sound,
+muted splendour.  He told her it was a reception night, with music: and
+added: 'I miss my .  .  .  seen anybody lately?'
+
+'Mr. Sowerby?' said she.  'He was to have escorted me back.  He may have
+overslept himself.'
+
+She spoke it plainly; when speaking of the dear good ladies, she set a
+gentle humour at play, and comforted him, as she intended, with a
+souvenir of her lively spirit, wanting only in the manner of gaiety.
+
+He allowed, that she could not be quite gay.
+
+More deeply touched the next minute, he felt in her voice, in her look,
+in her phrasing of speech, an older, much older daughter than the Fredi
+whom he had conducted to Moorsedge.  'Kiss me,' he said.
+
+She turned to him full-front, and kissed his right cheek and left, and
+his forehead, saying: 'My love!  my papa!  my own dear dada!' all the
+words of her girlhood in her new sedateness; and smiling: like the moral
+crepuscular of a sunlighted day down a not totally inanimate Sunday
+Londen street.
+
+He strained her to his breast.  'Mama soon be here?'
+
+'Soon.'
+
+That was well.  And possibly at the present moment applying, with her
+cunning hand, the cosmetics and powders he could excuse for a concealment
+of the traces of grief.
+
+Satisfied in being a superficial observer, he did not spy to see more
+than the world would when Nataly entered the dining-room at the quiet
+family dinner.  She performed her part for his comfort, though not
+prattling; and he missed his Fredi's delicious warble of the prattle
+running rill-like over our daily humdrum.  Simeon Fenellan would have
+helped.  Then suddenly came enlivenment: a recollection of news in the
+morning's paper.  'No harm before Fredi, my dear.  She's a young woman
+now.  And no harm, so to speak-at least, not against the Sanfredini.
+She has donned her name again, and a villa on Como, leaving her 'duque';
+--paragraph from a Milanese musical Journal; no particulars.  Now, mark
+me, we shall have her at Lakelands in the Summer.  If only we could have
+her now!'
+
+'It would be a pleasure,' said Nataly.  Her heart had a blow in the
+thought, that a lady of this kind would create the pleasure by not
+bringing criticism.
+
+'The godmother?' he glistened upon Nesta.
+
+She gave him low half-notes of the little blue butterfly's imitation of
+the superb contralto; and her hand and head at turn to hint the
+theatrical operatic attitude.
+
+'Delicious!' he cried, his eyelids were bedewed at the vision of the
+three of them planted in the past; and here again, out of the dark wood,
+where something had required to be said, and had been said; and all was
+happily over, owing to the goodness and sweetness of the two dear
+innocents;--whom heaven bless!  Jealousy of their naturally closer heart-
+at-heart, had not a whisper for him; part of their goodness and sweetness
+was felt to be in the not excluding him.
+
+Nesta engaged to sing one of the 'old duets with her mother.  She saw her
+mother's breast lift in a mechanical effort to try imaginary notes, as if
+doubtful of her capacity, more at home in the dumb deep sigh they fell
+to.  Her mother's heroism made her a sacred woman to the thoughts of the
+girl, overcoming wonderment at the extreme submissiveness.
+
+She put a screw on her mind to perceive the rational object there might
+be for causing her mother to go through tortures in receiving and
+visiting; and she was arrested by the louder question, whether she could
+think such a man as her father irrational.
+
+People with resounding names, waves of a steady stream, were announced by
+Arlington, just as in the days, that seemed remote, before she went to
+Moorsedge; only they were more numerous, and some of the titles had
+ascended a stage.  There were great lords, there were many great ladies;
+and Lady Grace Halley shuffling amid them, like a silken shimmer in
+voluminous robes.
+
+They crowded about their host where he stood.  'He, is their Law!' Colney
+said, speaking unintelligibly, in the absence of the Simeon Fenellan
+regretted so loudly by Mr. Beaves Urmsing.  They had an air of
+worshipping, and he of swimming.
+
+There were also City magnates, and Lakelands' neighbours: the gentleman
+representing Pride of Port, Sir Abraham Quatley; and Colonel Corfe; Sir
+Rodwell and Lady Blachington; Mrs. Fanning; Mr. Caddis.  Few young men
+and maids were seen.  Dr. John Cormyn came without his wife, not
+mentioning her.  Mrs. Peter Yatt touched the notes for voices at the
+piano.  Priscilla Graves was a vacancy, and likewise the Rev. Septimus
+Barmby.  Peridon and Catkin, and Mr. Pempton took their usual places.
+There was no fluting.  A famous Canadian lady was the principal singer.
+A Galician violinist, zig-zagging extreme extensions and contractions of
+his corporeal frame in execution, and described by Colney as 'Paganini on
+wall,' failed to supplant Durandarte in Nesta's memory.  She was asked by
+Lady Grace for the latest of Dudley.  Sir Abraham Quatley named him with
+handsome emphasis.  Great dames caressed her; openly approved; shadowed
+the future place among them.
+
+Victor alluded at night to Mrs. John Cormyn's absence.  He said: 'A
+homoeopathic doctor's wife!' nothing more; and by that little, he
+prepared Nesta for her mother's explanation.  The great London people,
+ignorant or not, were caught by the strong tide he created, and carried
+on it.  But there was a bruiting of the secret among their set; and the
+one to fall away from her, Nataly marvellingly named Mrs. John Cormyn;
+whose marriage was of her making.  She did not disapprove Priscilla's
+behaviour.  Priscilla had come to her and, protesting affection, had
+openly stated, that she required time and retirement to recover her
+proper feelings.  Nataly smiled a melancholy criticism of an inconsequent
+or capricious woman, in relating to Nesta certain observations Priscilla
+had dropped upon poor faithful Mr. Pempton, because of his concealment
+from her of his knowledge of things for this faithful gentleman had been
+one of the few not ignorant.  The rumour was traceable to the City.
+
+'Mother, we walk on planks,' Nesta said.
+
+Nataly answered: 'You will grow used to it.'
+
+Her mother's habitual serenity in martyrdom was deceiving.  Nesta had a
+transient suspicion, that she had grown, from use, to like the whirl of
+company, for oblivion in the excitement; and as her remembrance of her
+own station among the crowding people was a hot flush, the difference of
+their feelings chilled her.
+
+Nataly said: 'It is to-morrow night again; we do not rest.'  She smiled;
+and at once the girl read woman's armour on the dear face, and asked
+herself, Could I be so brave?  The question following was a speechless
+wave, that surged at her father.  She tried to fathom the scheme he
+entertained.  The attempt obscured her conception of the man he was.  She
+could not grasp him, being too young for knowing, that young heads cannot
+obtain a critical hold upon one whom they see grandly succeeding it is
+the sun's brilliance to their eyes.
+
+Mother and daughter slept together that night, and their embrace was
+their world.
+
+Nesta delighted her father the next day by walking beside him into the,
+City, as far as the end of the Embankment, where the carriage was in
+waiting with her maid to bring her back; and at his mere ejaculation of a
+wish, the hardy girl drove down in the afternoon for the walk home with
+him.  Lady Grace Halley was at the office.  'I'm an incorrigible Stock
+Exchange gambler,' she said.
+
+'Only,' Victor bade her beware, 'Mines are undulating in movement, and
+their heights are a preparation for their going down.'
+
+She said she 'liked a swing.'
+
+Nesta looked at them in turn.
+
+The day after and the day after, Lady Grace was present.  She made play
+with Dudley's name.
+
+This coming into the City daily of a girl, for the sake of walking back
+in winter weather with her father, struck her as ambiguous: either a
+jealous foolish mother's device, or that of a weak man beating about for
+protection.  But the woman of the positive world soon read to the
+contrary; helped a little by the man, no doubt.  She read rather too much
+to the contrary, and took the pedestrian girl for perfect simplicity in
+her tastes, when Nesta had so far grown watchful as to feel relieved by
+the lady's departure.  Her mother, without sympathy for the lady, was too
+great of soul for jealousy.  Victor had his Nataly before him at a hint
+from Lady Grace: and he went somewhat further than the exact degree when
+affirming, that Nataly could not scheme, and was incapable of
+suspecting.--Nataly could perceive things with a certain accuracy: she
+would not stoop to a meanness.  'Plot?  Nataly?' said he, and shrugged.
+In fact, the void of plot, drama, shuffle of excitement, reflected upon
+Nataly.  He might have seen as tragic as ever dripped on Stage, had he
+looked.
+
+But the walk Westward with his girl, together with pride in a daughter
+who clove her way through all weathers, won his heart to exultation.
+He told her: 'Fredi does her dada so much good'; not telling her in what,
+or opening any passage to the mystery of the man he was.  She was trying
+to be a student of life, with her eyes down upon hard earth, despite of
+her winged young head; she would have compassed him better had he dilated
+in sublime fashion; but he baffled her perusal of a man of power by the
+simpleness of his enjoyment of small things coming in his way;--the
+lighted shops, the crowd, emergence from the crowd, or the meeting near
+midwinter of a soft warm wind along the Embankment, and dark Thames
+magnificently coroneted over his grimy flow.  There is no grasping of one
+who quickens us.
+
+His flattery of his girl, too, restored her broken feeling of personal
+value; it permeated her nourishingly from the natural breath of him that
+it was.
+
+At times he touched deep in humaneness; and he set her heart leaping on
+the flash of a thought to lay it bare, with the secret it held, for his
+help.  That was a dream.  She could more easily have uttered the words to
+Captain Dartrey, after her remembered abashing holy tremour of the vision
+of doing it and casting herself on noblest man's compassionateness; and
+her imagined thousand emotions;--a rolling music within her, a wreath of
+cloudglory in her sky;--which had, as with virgins it may be, plighted
+her body to him for sheer urgency of soul; drawn her by a single
+unwitting-to-brain, conscious-in-blood, shy curl outward of the sheathing
+leaf to the flowering of woman to him; even to the shore of that strange
+sea, where the maid stands choosing this one man for her destiny, as in a
+trance.  So are these young ones unfolded, shade by shade; and a shade is
+all the difference with them; they can teach the poet to marvel at the
+immensity of vitality in 'the shadow of a shade.'
+
+Her father shut the glimpse of a possible speaking to him of Mrs.
+Marsett, with a renewal of his eulogistic allusions to Dudley Sowerby:
+the 'perfect gentleman, good citizen'; prospective heir to an earldom
+besides.  She bowed to Dudley's merits; she read off the honorific
+pedimental letters of a handsome statue, for a sign to herself that she
+passed it.
+
+She was unjust, as Victor could feel, though he did not know how coldly
+unjust.  For among the exorbitant requisitions upon their fellow-
+creatures made by the young, is the demand, that they be definite: no
+mercy is in them for the transitional.  And Dudley--and it was under her
+influence, and painfully, not ignobly--was in process of development:
+interesting to philosophers, if not to maidens.
+
+Victor accused her of paying too much heed to Colney Durance's epigrams
+upon their friends.  He quite joined with his English world in its
+opinion, that epigrams are poor squibs when they do not come out of great
+guns.  Epigrams fired at a venerable nation, are surely the poorest of
+popgun paper pellets.  The English kick at the insolence, when they are
+not in the mood for pelleting themselves, or when the armed Foreigner is
+overshadowing and braceing.  Colney's pretentious and laboured Satiric
+Prose Epic of 'THE RIVAL TONGUES,' particularly offended him, as being a
+clever aim at no hitting; and sustained him, inasmuch as it was an acid
+friend's collapse.  How could Colney expect his English to tolerate such
+a spiteful diatribe!  The suicide of Dr. Bouthoin at San Francisco was
+the finishing stroke to the chances of success of the Serial;--although
+we are promised splendid evolutions on the part of Mr. Semhians; who,
+after brilliant achievements with bat and ball, abandons those weapons of
+Old England's modern renown, for a determined wrestle with our English
+pronunciation of words, and rescue of the spelling of them from the
+printer.  His headache over the present treatment of the verb 'To bid,'
+was a quaint beginning for one who had soon to plead before Japanese, and
+who acknowledged now 'in contrition of spirit,' that in formerly opposing
+the scheme for an Academy, he helped to the handing of our noble language
+to the rapid reporter of news for an apathetic public.  Further, he
+discovered in astonishment the subordination of all literary Americans to
+the decrees of their literary authorities; marking a Transatlantic point
+of departure, and contrasting ominously with the unruly Islanders
+'grunting the higgledy-piggledy of their various ways, in all the
+porker's gut-gamut at the rush to the trough.'  After a week's privation
+of bat and ball, he is, lighted or not, a gas-jet of satire upon his
+countrymen.  As for the 'pathetic sublimity of the Funeral of Dr.
+Bouthoin,' Victor inveighed against an impious irony in the over dose of
+the pathos; and the same might be suspected in Britannia's elegy upon
+him, a strain of hot eulogy throughout.  Mr. Semhians, all but
+treasonably, calls it, Papboat and Brandy:--'our English literary diet of
+the day': stimulating and not nourishing.  Britannia's mournful
+anticipation, that 'The shroud enwinding this my son is mine!'--should
+the modern generation depart from the track of him who proved himself the
+giant in mainly supporting her glory--was, no doubt, a high pitch of the
+note of Conservatism.  But considering, that Dr. Bouthoin 'committed
+suicide under a depression of mind produced by a surfeit of unaccustomed
+dishes, upon a physical system inspired by the traditions of exercise,
+and no longer relieved by the practice'--to translate from Dr. Gannius:
+we are again at war with the writer's reverential tone, and we know not
+what to think: except, that Mr. Durance was a Saturday meat market's
+butcher in the Satiric Art.
+
+Nesta found it pleasanter to see him than to hear of his work: which, to
+her present feeling, was inhuman.  As little as our native public, had
+she then any sympathy for the working in the idea: she wanted throbs,
+visible aims, the Christian incarnate; she would have preferred the tale
+of slaughter--periodically invading all English classes as a flush from
+the undrained lower, Vikings all--to frigid sterile Satire.  And truly it
+is not a fruit-bearing rod.  Colney had to stand on the defence of it
+against the damsel's charges.  He thought the use of the rod, while
+expressing profound regret at a difference of opinion between him and
+those noble heathens, beneficial for boys; but in relation to their
+seniors, and particularly for old gentlemen, he thought that the sharpest
+rod to cut the skin was the sole saving of them.  Insensibility to
+Satire, he likened to the hard-mouthed horse; which is doomed to the
+worser thing in consequence.  And consequently upon the lack of it, and
+of training to appreciate it, he described his country's male venerables
+as being distinguishable from annuitant spinsters only in presenting
+themselves forked.
+
+'He is unsuccessful and embittered, Victor said to Nesta.  'Colney will
+find in the end, that he has lost his game and soured himself by never
+making concessions.  Here's this absurd Serial--it fails, of course; and
+then he has to say, it's because he won't tickle his English, won't enter
+into a "frowzy complicity" with their tastes.'
+
+'But--I think of Skepsey honest creatures respect Mr. Durance, and he is
+always ready to help them,' said Nesta.
+
+'If he can patronize.'
+
+'Does he patronize me, dada?'
+
+'You are one of his exceptions.  Marry a title and live in state--and
+then hear him!  I am successful, and the result of it is, that he won't
+acknowledge wisdom in anything I say or do; he will hardly acknowledge
+the success.  It is "a dirty road to success," he says.  So that, if
+successful, I must have rolled myself in mire.  I compelled him to admit
+he was wrong about your being received at Moorsedge: a bit of a triumph!'
+
+Nesta's walks with her father were no loss of her to Nataly; the girl
+came back to her bearing so fresh and so full a heart; and her father was
+ever prouder of her: he presented new features of her in his quotations
+of her sayings, thoughtful sayings.  'I declare she helps one to think,'
+he said.  'It 's not precocity; it 's healthy inquiry.  She brings me
+nearer ideas of my own, not yet examined, than any one else does.  I say,
+what a wife for a man!'
+
+'She takes my place beside you, dear, now I am not quite strong,' said
+Nataly.  'You have not seen .  .  .?'
+
+'Dudley Sowerby?  He's at Cronidge, I believe.  His elder brother's in a
+bad way.  Bad business, this looking to a death.'
+
+Nataly eyes revealed a similar gulf.
+
+Let it be cast on Society, then!  A Society opposing Nature forces us to
+these murderous looks upon impediments.  But what of a Society in the
+dance with Nature?  Victor did not approve of that.  He began, under the
+influence of Nesta's companionship, to see the Goddess Nature there is in
+a chastened nature.  And this view shook the curtain covering his lost
+Idea.  He felt sure he should grasp it soon and enter into its daylight:
+a muffled voice within him said, that he was kept waiting to do so by the
+inexplicable tardiness of a certain one to rise ascending to her
+spiritual roost.  She was now harmless to strike: Themison, Carling,
+Jarniman, even the Rev. Groseman Buttermore, had been won to the cause of
+humanity.  Her ascent, considering her inability to do further harm
+below, was most mysteriously delayed.  Owing to it, in a manner almost as
+mysterious, he was kept crossing a bridge having a slippery bit on it.
+Thanks to his gallant Fredi, he had found his feet again.  But there was
+a bruise where, to his honour, he felt tenderest.  And Fredi away, he
+might be down again--for no love of a slippery bit, proved slippery, one
+might guess, by a predecessor or two.  Ta-ta-ta-to and mum!  Still, in
+justice to the little woman, she had been serviceable.
+
+She would be still more so, if a member of Parliament now on his back
+here we are with the murder-eye again!
+
+Nesta's never speaking of Lakelands clouded him a little, as an
+intimation of her bent of mind.
+
+'And does my girl come to her dada to-day?' he said, on the fifth morning
+since her return; prepared with a villanous resignation to hear, that
+this day she abstained, though he had the wish for her coming.
+
+'Why, don't you know,' said she, 'we all meet to have tea in Mr.
+Durance's chambers; and I walk back with you, and there we are joined
+by mama; and we are to have a feast of literary celebrities.'
+
+'Colney's selection of them!  And Simeon Fenellan, I hope.  Perhaps
+Dartrey.  Perhaps .  .  .  eh?'
+
+She reddened.  So Dudley Sowerby's unspoken name could bring the blush to
+her cheeks.  Dudley had his excuses in his brother's condition.  His
+father's health, too, was--but this was Dudley calculating.  Where there
+are coronets, calculations of this sort must needs occur; just as where
+there are complications.  Odd, one fancies it, that we walking along the
+pavement of civilized life, should be perpetually summoning Orcus to our
+aid, for the sake of getting a clear course.
+
+'And supposing a fog, my dearie?' he said.
+
+'The daughter in search of her father carries a lamp to light her to him
+through densest fogs as well as over deserts,' etc.  She declaimed a long
+sentence, to set the ripple running in his features; and when he left the
+room for a last word with Armandine, she flung arms round her mother's
+neck, murmuring: 'Mother!  mother!' a cry equal to 'I am sure I do
+right,' and understood so by Nataly approving it; she too on the line of
+her instinct, without an object in sight.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+THE MOTHER-THE DAUGHTER
+
+Taking Nesta's hand, on her entry into his chambers with her father,
+Colney Durance bowed over it and kissed it.  The unusual performance had
+a meaning; she felt she was praised.  It might be because she made
+herself her father's companion.  'I can't persuade him to put on a great-
+coat,' she said.  'You would defeat his aim at the particular waistcoat
+of his ambition,' said Colney, goaded to speak, not anxious to be heard.
+
+He kept her beside him, leading her about for introductions to multiform
+celebrities of both sexes; among them the gentleman editing the Magazine
+which gave out serially THE RIVAL TONGUES: and there was talk of a
+dragon-throated public's queer appetite in Letters.  The pained Editor
+deferentially smiled at her cheerful mention of Delphica.  'In, book
+form, perhaps!' he remarked, with plaintive' resignation; adding: 'You
+read it?'  And a lady exclaimed: 'We all read it!'
+
+But we are the elect, who see signification and catch flavour; and we are
+reminded of an insatiable monster how sometimes capricious is his gorge.
+'He may happen to be in the humour for a shaking!'  Colney's poor
+consolation it was to say of the prospects of his published book: for the
+funny monster has been known to like a shaking.
+
+'He takes it kinder tickled,' said Fenellan, joining the group and
+grasping Nesta's hand with a warmth that thrilled her and set her
+guessing.  'A taste of his favourite Cayenne lollypop, Colney; it fetches
+the tear he loves to shed, or it gives him digestive heat in the bag of
+his literary receptacle-fearfully relaxed and enormous!  And no wonder;
+his is to lie him down on notion of the attitude for reading, his back;
+and he has in a jiffy the funnel of the Libraries inserted into his
+mouth, and he feels the publishers pouring their gallons through it
+unlimitedly; never crying out, which he can't; only swelling, which he's
+obliged to do, with a non-nutritious inflation; and that's his
+intellectual enjoyment; bearing a likeness to the horrible old torture of
+the baillir d'eau; and he's doomed to perish in the worst book-form of
+dropsy.  You, my dear Colney, have offended his police or excise, who
+stand by the funnel, in touch with his palate, to make sure that nothing
+above proof is poured in; and there's your misfortune.  He's not half a
+bad fellow, you find when you haven't got to serve him.'
+
+'Superior to his official parasites, one supposes!' Colney murmured.
+
+The celebrities were unaffectedly interested in a literary failure having
+certain merits; they discussed it, to compliment the crownless author;
+and the fervider they, the more was he endowed to read the meanness
+prompting the generosity.  Publication of a book, is the philosopher's
+lantern upon one's fellows.
+
+Colney was caught away from his private manufactory of acids by hearing
+Simeon Fenellan relate to Victor some of the recent occurrences at
+Brighton.  Simeon's tone was unsatisfying; Colney would have the word;
+he was like steel on the grindstone for such a theme of our national
+grotesque-sublime.
+
+'That Demerara Supple-jack, Victor!  Don't listen to Simeon; he's a man
+of lean narrative, fit to chronicle political party wrangles and such
+like crop of carcase prose: this is epical.  In DRINK we have Old
+England's organic Epic; Greeks and Trojans; Parliamentary Olympus,
+ennobled brewers, nasal fanatics, all the machinery to hand.  Keep a
+straight eye on the primary motives of man, you'll own the English
+produce the material for proud verse; they're alive there!  Dartrey's
+Demerara makes a pretty episode of the battle.  I haven't seen it--if
+it's possible to look on it: but I hear it is flexible, of a vulgar
+appearance in repose, Jove's lightning at one time, the thong of AEacus
+at another.  Observe Dartrey marching off to the Station, for the purpose
+of laying his miraculous weapon across the shoulders of a son of Mars,
+who had offended.  But we have his name, my dear Victor!  His name,
+Simeon?--Worrell; a Major Worrell: his offence being probably, that he
+obtained military instruction in the Service, and left it at his
+convenience, for our poor patch and tatter British Army to take in his
+place another young student, who'll grow up to do similarly.  And
+Dartrey, we assume, is off to stop that system.  You behold Sir Dartrey
+twirling the weapon in preparatory fashion; because he is determined we
+shall have an army of trained officers instead of infant amateurs heading
+heroic louts.  Not a thought of Beer in Dartrey!--always unpatriotic, you
+'ll say.  Plato entreats his absent mistress to fix eyes on a star: eyes
+on Beer for the uniting of you English!  I tell you no poetic fiction.
+Seeing him on his way, thus terribly armed, and knowing his intent,
+Venus, to shield a former favourite servant of Mars, conjured the most
+diverting of interventions, in the shape of a young woman in a poke-
+bonnet, and Skepsey, her squire, marching with a dozen or so, informing
+bedevilled mankind of the hideousness of our hymnification when it is not
+under secluding sanction of the Edifice, and challengeing criticism; and
+that was hard by, and real English, in the form of bludgeons, wielded by
+a battalion of the national idol Bungay Beervat's boys; and they fell
+upon the hymners.  Here you fill in with pastoral similes.  They struck
+the maid adored by Skepsey.  And that was the blow which slew them!
+Our little man drove into the press with a pair of fists able to do their
+work.  A valiant skiff upon a sea of enemies, he was having it on the
+nob, and suddenly the Demerara lightened.  It flailed to thresh.  Enough.
+to say, brains would have come.  The Bungays made a show of fight.  No
+lack of blood in them, to stock a raw shilling's worth or gush before
+Achilles rageing.  You perceive the picture, you can almost sing the
+ballad.  We want only a few names of the fallen.  It was the carving of a
+maitre chef, according to Skepsey: right-left-and point, with supreme
+precision: they fell, accurately sliced from the joint.  Having done with
+them, Dartrey tossed the Demerara to Skepsey, and washed his hands of
+battle; and he let his major go unscathed.  Phlebotomy sufficient for the
+day!'
+
+Nesta's ears hummed with the name of Major Worrell.
+
+'Skepsey did come back to London with a rather damaged frontispiece,'
+Victor said.  'He can't have joined those people?'
+
+'They may suit one of your militant peacemakers,' interposed Fenellan.
+'The most placable creatures alive, and the surest for getting-up a
+shindy.'
+
+'Suit him!  They're the scandal of our streets.'  Victor was pricked with
+a jealousy of them for beguiling him of his trusty servant.
+
+'Look at your country, see where it shows its vitality,' said Colney.
+'You don't see elsewhere any vein in movement-movement,' he harped on the
+word Victor constantly employed to express the thing he wanted to see.
+'Think of that, when the procession sets your teeth on edge.  They're
+honest foes of vice, and they move:--in England!  Pulpit-preaching has no
+effect.  For gross maladies, gross remedies.  You may judge of what you
+are by the quality of the cure.  Puritanism, I won't attempt to paint--
+it would barely be decent; but compare it with the spectacle of English
+frivolity, and you'll admit it to be the best show you make.  It may
+still be the saving of you--on the level of the orderly ox: I 've not
+observed that it aims at higher.  And talking of the pulpit, Barmby is
+off to the East, has accepted a Shoreditch curacy, Skepsey tells me.'
+
+'So there's the reason for our not seeing him!' Victor turned to Nesta.
+
+'Papa, you won't be angry with Skepsey if he has joined those people,'
+said Nesta.  'I'm sure he thinks of serving his country, Mr. Durance.'
+
+Colney smiled on her.  'And you too?'
+
+'If women knew how!'
+
+'They're hitting on more ways at present than the men--in England.'
+
+'But, Mr. Durance, it speaks well for England when they're allowed the
+chance here.'
+
+'Good!' Fenellan exclaimed.  'And that upsets his placement of the modern
+national genders: Germany masculine, France feminine, Old England what
+remains.'
+
+Victor ruffled and reddened on his shout of 'Neuter?'
+
+Their circle widened.  Nesta knew she was on promotion, by her being led
+about and introduced to ladies.  They were encouraging with her.  One of
+them, a Mrs. Marina Floyer, had recently raised a standard of feminine
+insurrection.  She said: 'I hear your praises from Mr. Durance.  He
+rarely praises.  You have shown capacity to meditate on the condition of
+women, he says.'
+
+Nesta drew a shorter breath, with a hope at heart.  She speculated in the
+dark, as to whether her aim to serve and help was not so friendless.  And
+did Mr. Durance approve?  But surely she stood in a glorious England if
+there were men and women to welcome a girl to their councils.  Oh!  that
+is the broad free England where gentlemen and gentlewomen accept of the
+meanest aid to cleanse the land of its iniquities, and do not suffer
+shame to smite a young face for touching upon horrors with a pure design.
+
+She cried in her bosom: I feel!  She had no other expression for that
+which is as near as great natures may come to the conceiving of the
+celestial spirit from an emissary angel; and she trembled, the fire ran
+through her.  It seemed to her, that she would be called to help or that
+certainly they were nearing to an effacement of the woefullest of evils;
+and if not helping, it would still be a blessedness for her to kneel
+thanking heaven.
+
+Society was being attacked and defended.  She could but studiously
+listen.  Her father was listening.  The assailant was a lady; and she had
+a hearing, although she treated Society as a discrowned monarch on trial
+for an offence against a more precious: viz., the individual cramped by
+brutish laws: the individual with the ideas of our time, righteously
+claiming expansion out of the clutches of a narrow old-world
+disciplinarian-that giant hypocrite!  She flung the gauntlet at
+externally venerable Institutions; and she had a hearing, where
+horrification, execration, the foul Furies of Conservatism would in a
+shortly antecedent day have been hissing and snakily lashing, hounding
+her to expulsion.  Mrs. Marina Floyer gravely seconded her.  Colney did
+the same.  Victor turned sharp on him.  'Yes,' Colney said; 'we unfold
+the standard of extremes in this country, to get a single step taken:
+that's how we move: we threaten death to get footway.  Now, mark:
+Society's errors will be admitted.'
+
+A gentleman spoke.  He began by admitting Society's errors.
+Nevertheless, it so distinctly exists for the common good, that we may
+say of Society in relation to the individual, it is the body to the soul.
+We may wash, trim, purify, but we must not maim it.  The assertion of our
+individuality in opposition to the Government of Society--this existing
+Society--is a toss of the cap for the erasure of our civilization, et
+caetera.
+
+Platitudes can be of intense interest if they approach our case.--But, if
+you please, we ask permission to wash, trim, purify, and we do not get
+it.--But you have it!  Because we take it at our peril; and you, who are
+too cowardly to grant or withhold, call-up the revolutionary from the
+pits by your slackness:--etc.  There was a pretty hot debate.  Both
+assailant and defendant, to Victor's thinking, spoke well, and each the
+right thing and he could have made use of both, but he could answer
+neither.  He beat about for the cause of this deficiency, and discovered
+it in his position.  Mentally, he was on the side of Society.  Yet he was
+annoyed to find the attack was so easily answerable when the defence
+unfolded.  But it was absurd to expect it would not be.  And in fact, a
+position secretly rebellious is equal to water on the brain for
+stultifying us.
+
+Before the controversy was over, a note in Nataly's handwriting called
+him home.  She wrote: 'Make my excuses.  C. D.  will give Nesta and some
+lady dinner.  A visitor here.  Come alone, and without delay.  Quite
+well, robust.  Impatient to consult with you, nothing else.'
+
+Nesta was happy to stay; and Victor set forth.
+
+The visitor?  plainly Dudley.  Nataly's trusting the girl to the chance
+of some lady being present, was unlike her.  Dudley might be tugging at
+the cord; and the recent conversation upon Society, rendered one of its
+gilt pillars particularly estimable.--A person in the debate had declared
+this modern protest on behalf of individualism to represent Society's
+Criminal Trial.  And it is likely to be a long one.  And good for the
+world, that we see such a Trial!--Well said or not, undoubtedly Society
+is an old criminal: not much more advanced than the state of spiritual
+worship where bloody sacrifice was offered to a hungry Lord.  But it has
+a case for pleading.  We may liken it, as we have it now, to the bumping
+lumberer's raft; suitable along torrent waters until we come to smoother.
+Are we not on waters of a certain smoothness at the reflecting level?--
+enough to justify demands for a vessel of finer design.  If Society is to
+subsist, it must have the human with the logical argument against the cry
+of the free-flags, instead of presenting a block's obtuseness.  That, you
+need not hesitate to believe, will be rolled downward and disintegrated,
+sooner than later.  A Society based on the logical concrete of humane
+considerateness:--a Society prohibiting to Mrs. Burman her wielding of a
+life-long rod .  .  .  .
+
+The personal element again to confuse inquiry!--And Skepsey and Barmby
+both of them bent on doing work without inquiry of any sort!  They were
+enviable: they were good fellows.  Victor clung to the theme because it
+hinted of next door to his lost Idea.  He rubbed the back of his head,
+fancying a throb there.  Are civilized creatures incapable of abstract
+thought when their social position is dubious?  For if so, we never can
+be quit of those we forsake.--Apparently Mrs. Burman's unfathomed power
+lay in her compelling him to summon the devilish in himself and play upon
+the impish in Society, that he might overcome her.
+
+Victor's house-door stopped this current.
+
+Nataly took his embrace.
+
+'Nothing wrong?' he said, and saw the something.  It was a favourable
+moment to tell her what she might not at another time regard as a small
+affair.  'News in the City to-day of that South London borough being
+vacated.  Quatley urges me.  A death again!  I saw Pempton, too.  Will
+you credit me when I tell you he carries his infatuation so far, that he
+has been investing in Japanese and Chinese Loans, because they are less
+meat-eaters than others, and vegetarians are more stable, and outlast us
+all!--Dudley the visitor?'  'Mr. Sowerby has been here,' she said, in a
+shaking low voice.
+
+Victor held her hand and felt a squeeze more nervous than affectionate.
+
+'To consult with me,' she added.  'My maid will go at ten to bring Nesta;
+Mr. Durance I can count on, to see her safe home.  Ah!' she wailed.
+
+Victor nodded, saying: 'I guess.  And, my love, you will receive Mrs.
+John Cormyn to-morrow morning.  I can't endure gaps.  Gaps in our circle
+must never be.  Do I guess?--I spoke to Colney about bringing her home.'
+
+Nataly sighed: 'Ah!  make what provision we will!  Evil--Mr. Sowerby has
+had a great deal to bear.'
+
+'A worldling may think so.'
+
+Her breast heaved, and the wave burst: but her restraining of tears froze
+her speech.
+
+'Victor!  Our Nesta!  Mr. Sowerby is unable to explain.  And how the Miss
+Duvidneys!  .  .  .  At that Brighton!'--The voice he heard was not his
+darling's deep rich note, it had dropped to toneless hoarseness: 'She has
+been permitted to make acquaintance--she has been seen riding with--she
+has called upon--Oh! it is one of those abandoned women.  In her house!
+Our girl!  Our Nesta!  She was insulted by a man in the woman's house.
+She is talked of over Brighton.  The mother!--the daughter!  And grant me
+this--that never was girl more carefully .  .  .  never till she was
+taken from me.  Oh!  do not forget.  You will defend me?  You will say,
+that her mother did with all her soul strive .  .  .  It is not a rumour.
+Mr. Sowerby has had it confirmed.'  A sob caught her voice.
+
+Victor's hands caressed to console: 'Dudley does not propose to .  .  ?'
+
+'Nesta must promise .  .  .  But how it happened?  How!  An acquaintance
+with--contact with!--Oh!  cruel!'  Each time she ceased speaking, the
+wrinkles of a shiver went over her, and the tone was of tears coming, but
+she locked them in.
+
+'An accident!' said Victor; 'some misunderstanding--there can't be harm.
+Of course, she promises--hasn't to promise.  How could a girl
+distinguish!  He does not cast blame on her?'
+
+'Dear, if you would go down to Dartrey to-morrow.  He knows:--it is over
+the Clubs there; he will tell you, before a word to Nesta.  Innocent,
+yes!  Mr. Sowerby has not to be assured of that.  Ignorant of the
+character of the dreadful woman?  Ah, if I could ever in anything think
+her ignorant!  She frightens me.  Mr. Sowerby is indulgent.  He does me
+justice.  My duty to her--I must defend myself--has been my first
+thought.  I said in my prayers--she at least!  .  .  .  We have to see
+the more than common reasons why she, of all girls, should--he did not
+hint it, he was delicate: her name must not be public.'
+
+'Yes, yes, Dudley is without parallel as a gentleman,' said Victor.  'It
+does not suit me to hear the word "indulgent."  My dear, if you were down
+there, you would discover that the talk was the talk of two or three men
+seeing our girl ride by--and she did ride with a troop: why, we've
+watched them along the parade, often.  Clear as day how it happened!
+I'll go down early to-morrow.'
+
+He fancied Nataly was appeased.  And even out of this annoyance, there
+was the gain of her being won to favour Dudley's hitherto but tolerated
+suit.
+
+Nataly also had the fancy, that the calm following on her anguish, was a
+moderation of it.  She was kept strung to confide in her girl by the
+recent indebtedness to her for words heavenly in the strengthening
+comfort they gave.  But no sooner was she alone than her torturing
+perplexities and her abasement of the hours previous to Victor's
+coming returned.
+
+For a girl of Nesta's head could not be deceived; she had come home with
+a woman's intelligence of the world, hard knowledge of it--a knowledge
+drawn from foul wells, the unhappy mother imagined: she dreaded to probe
+to the depth of it.  She had in her wounded breast the world's idea, that
+corruption must come of the contact with impurity.
+
+Nataly renewed her cry of despair: 'The mother!--the daughter!'--her sole
+revelation of the heart's hollows in her stammered speaking to Victor.
+
+She thanked heaven for the loneliness of her bed, where she could repeat:
+'The mother!--the daughter!' hearing the world's words:--the daughter
+excused, by reason of her having such a mother; the mother unpitied for
+the bruiting of her brazen daughter's name: but both alike consigned to
+the corners of the world's dust-heaps.  She cried out, that her pride was
+broken.  Her pride, her last support of life, had gone to pieces.  The
+tears she restrained in Victor's presence, were called on to come now,
+and she had none.  It might be, that she had not strength for weeping.
+She was very weak.  Rising from bed to lock her door against Nesta's
+entry to the room on her return at night, she could hardly stand: a chill
+and a clouding overcame her.  The quitted bed seemed the haven of a
+drifted wreck to reach.
+
+Victor tried the handle of a locked door in the dark of the early winter
+morning.  'The mother!--the daughter!' had swung a pendulum for some time
+during the night in him, too.  He would rather have been subjected to the
+spectacle of tears than have heard that toneless voice, as it were the
+dry torrent-bed rolling blocks instead of melodious, if afflicting,
+waters.
+
+He told Nesta not to disturb her mother, and murmured of a headache:
+'Though, upon my word, the best cure for mama would be a look into
+Fredi's eyes!' he said, embracing his girl, quite believing in her, just
+a little afraid of her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII
+
+NATALY, NESTA, AND DARTREY FENELLAN
+
+Pleasant things, that come to us too late for our savour of the sweetness
+in them, toll ominously of life on the last walk to its end.  Yesterday,
+before Dudley Sowerby's visit, Nataly would have been stirred where the
+tears we shed for happiness or repress at a flattery dwell when seeing
+her friend Mrs. John Cormyn enter her boudoir and hearing her speak
+repentantly, most tenderly.  Mrs. John said: 'You will believe I have
+suffered, dear; I am half my weight, I do think': and she did not set the
+smile of responsive humour moving; although these two ladies had a key of
+laughter between them.  Nataly took her kiss; held her hand, and at the
+parting kissed her.  She would rather have seen her friend than not: so
+far she differed from a corpse; but she was near the likeness to the dead
+in the insensibility to any change of light shining on one who best loved
+darkness and silence.  She cried to herself wilfully, that her pride was
+broken: as women do when they spurn at the wounding of a dignity they
+cannot protect and die to see bleeding; for in it they live.
+
+The cry came of her pride unbroken, sore bruised, and after a certain
+space for recovery combative.  She said:
+
+Any expiation I could offer where I did injury, I would not refuse; I
+would humble myself and bless heaven for being able to pay my debt--what
+I can of it.  All I contend against is, injustice.  And she sank into
+sensational protests of her anxious care of her daughter, too proud to
+phrase them.
+
+Her one great affliction, the scourging affliction of her utter
+loneliness;--an outcast from her family; daily, and she knew not how,
+more shut away from the man she loved; now shut away from her girl;--
+seemed under the hand of the angel of God.  The abandonment of her by
+friends, was merely the light to show it.
+
+Midday's post brought her a letter from Priscilla Graves, entreating to
+be allowed to call on her next day.--We are not so easily cast off!
+Nataly said, bitterly, in relation to the lady whose offending had not
+been so great.  She wrote: 'Come, if sure that you sincerely wish to.'
+
+Having fasted, she ate at lunch in her dressing-room, with some taste of
+the food, haunted by an accusation of gluttony because of her eating at
+all, and a vile confession, that she was enabled to eat, owing to the
+receipt of Priscilla's empty letter: for her soul's desire was to be
+doing a deed of expiation, and the macerated flesh seemed her assurance
+to herself of the courage to make amends.--I must have some strength, she
+said wearifully, in apology for the morsel consumed.
+
+Nesta's being in the house with her, became an excessive irritation.
+Doubts of the girl's possible honesty to speak a reptile truth under
+question; amazement at her boldness to speak it; hatred of, the mouth
+that could: and loathing of the words, the theme; and abomination of
+herself for conjuring fictitious images to rouse real emotions; all ran
+counterthreads, that produced a mad pattern in the mind, affrighting to
+reason: and then, for its preservation, reason took a superrational leap,
+and ascribed the terrible injustice of this last cruel stroke to the
+divine scourge, recognized divine by the selection of the mortal spot for
+chastisement.  She clasped her breast, and said: It is mortal.  And that
+calmed her.
+
+She said, smiling: I never felt my sin until this blow came!  Therefore
+the blow was proved divine.  Ought it not to be welcomed?--and she
+appearing no better than one of those, the leprous of the sex!  And
+brought to acknowledgement of the likeness by her daughter!
+
+Nataly drank the poison distilled from her exclamations and was ice.  She
+had denied herself to Nesta's redoubled petition.  Nesta knocking at the
+door a third time and calling, tore the mother two ways: to have her girl
+on her breast or snap their union in a word with an edge.  She heard the
+voice of Dartrey Fenellan.
+
+He was admitted.  'No, dear,' she said to Nesta; and Nesta's, 'My own
+mother,' consentingly said, in tender resignation, as she retired, sprang
+a stinging tear to the mother's eyelids.
+
+Dartrey looked at the door closing on the girl.
+
+'Is it a very low woman?' Nataly asked him in a Church whisper, with a
+face abashed.
+
+'It is not,' said he, quick to meet any abruptness.
+
+'She must be cunning.'
+
+'In the ordinary way.  We say it of Puss before the hounds.'
+
+'To deceive a girl like Nesta!'
+
+'She has done no harm.'
+
+'Dartrey, you speak to a mother.  You have seen the woman?  She is?
+--ah!'
+
+'She is womanly, womanly.'
+
+'Quite one of those .  .  . ?'
+
+'My dear soul!  You can't shake them off in that way.  She is one of us.
+If we have the class, we can't escape from it.  They are not to bear all
+the burden because they exist.  We are the bigger debtors.  I tell you
+she is womanly.'
+
+'It sounds like horrid cynicism.'
+
+'Friends of mine would abuse it for the reverse.'
+
+'Do not make me hate your chivalry.  This woman is a rod on my back.
+Provided only she has not dropped venom into Nesta's mind!'
+
+'Don't fear!'
+
+'Can you tell me you think she has done no harm to my girl?'
+
+'To Nesta herself?--not any: not to a girl like your girl.'
+
+'To my girl's name?  Speak at once.  But I know she has.  She induced
+Nesta to go to her house.  My girl was insulted in this woman's house.'
+
+Dartrey's forehead ridged with his old fury and a gust of present
+contempt.  'I can tell you this, that the fellow who would think harm of
+it, knowing the facts 's not worthy of touching the tips of the fingers
+of your girl.'
+
+'She is talked of!'
+
+'A good-looking girl out riding with a handsome woman on a parade of
+idlers!'
+
+'The woman is notorious.'  Nataly said it shivering.
+
+He shook his head.  'Not true.'
+
+'She has an air of a lady?'
+
+'She sits a horse well.'
+
+'Would she to any extent deceive me--impose on me here?'
+
+'No.'
+
+'Ah!' Nataly moaned. . . .
+
+'But what?' said Dartrey.  'There was no pretence.  Her style is not
+worse than that of some we have seen.  There was no effort to deceive.
+The woman's plain for you and me to read, she has few of the arts; one or
+two tricks, if you like: and these were not needed for use.  There are
+women who have them, and have not been driven or let slip into the
+wilderness.'
+
+'Yes; I know!--those ideas of yours!' Nataly had once admired him for his
+knightliness toward the weakest women and the women underfoot.  'You have
+spoken to this woman?  She boasted of acquaintance with Nesta?'
+
+'She thanked God for having met her.'
+
+'Is it one of the hysterical creatures?'
+
+Mrs. Marsett appeared fronting Dartrey.
+
+He laughed to himself.  'A clever question.  There is a leaning to
+excitement of manner at times.  It 's not hysteria.  Allow for her
+position.'
+
+Nataly took the unintended blow, and bowed to it; and still more harshly
+said: 'What rank of life does the woman come from?'
+
+'The class educated for a skittish career by your popular Stage and your
+Book-stalls.  I am not precise?'
+
+'Leave Mr. Durance.  Is she in any degree commonly well bred?  .  .  .
+behaviour, talk-her English.'
+
+'I trench on Mr. Durance in replying.  Her English is passable.  You may
+hear .  .  .'
+
+'Everywhere, of course!  And this woman of slipshod English and excited
+manners imposed upon Nesta!'
+
+'It would not be my opinion.'
+
+'Did not impose on her!'
+
+'Not many would impose on Nesta Radnor for long.'
+
+'Think what that says, Dartrey!'
+
+'You have had a detestable version of the story.'
+
+'Because an excited creature thanks God to you for having met her!'
+
+'She may.  She's a better woman for having met her.  Don't suppose we're
+for supernatural conversions.  The woman makes no show of that.  But she
+has found a good soul among her sex--her better self in youth, as one
+guesses; and she is grateful--feels farther from exile in consequence.
+She has found a lady to take her by the hand!--not a common case.  She
+can never go to the utterly bad after knowing Nesta.  I forget if she
+says it; I say it.  You have heard the story from one of your
+conventional gentlemen.'
+
+'A true gentleman.  I have reason to thank him.  He has not your ideas on
+these matters, Dartrey.  He is very sensitive .  .  .  on Nesta's
+behalf.'
+
+'With reference to marriage.  I'll own I prefer another kind of
+gentleman.  I 've had my experience of that kind of gentleman.  Many
+of the kind have added their spot to the outcasts abominated for
+uncleanness--in holy unction.  Many?--I won't say all; but men who
+consent to hear black words pitched at them, and help to set good women
+facing away from them, are pious dolts or rascal dogs of hypocrites.
+They, if you'll let me quote Colney Durance to you to-day--and how is it
+he is not in favour?--they are tempting the Lord to turn the pillars of
+Society into pillars of salt.  Down comes the house.  And priests can
+rest in sight of it!--They ought to be dead against the sanctimony that
+believes it excommunicates when it curses.  The relationship is not
+dissolved so cheaply, though our Society affects to think it is.
+Barmby's off to the East End of this London, Victor informs me:--good
+fellow!  And there he'll be groaning over our vicious nature.  Nature is
+not more responsible for vice than she is for inhumanity.  Both bad, but
+the latter's the worse of the two.'
+
+Nataly interposed: 'I see the contrast, and see whom it's to strike.'
+
+Dartrey sent a thought after his meaning.  'Hardly that.  Let it stand.
+He 's only one with the world: but he shares the criminal infamy for
+crushing hope out of its frailest victims.  They're that--no sentiment.
+What a world, too, look behind it!--brutal because brutish.  The world
+may go hang: we expect more of your gentleman.  To hear of Nesta down
+there, and doubt that she was about good work; and come complaining!  He
+had the privilege of speaking to her, remonstrating, if he wished.  There
+are men who think--men!--the plucking of sinners out of the mire a dirty
+business.  They depute it to certain officials.  And your women--it's the
+taste of the world to have them educated so, that they can as little take
+the humane as the enlightened view.  Except, by the way, sometimes, in
+secret;--they have a sisterly breast.  In secret, they do occasionally
+think as they feel.  In public, the brass mask of the Idol they call
+Propriety commands or supplies their feelings and thoughts.  I won't
+repeat my reasons for educating them differently.  At present we have but
+half the woman to go through life with--and thank you.'
+
+Dartrey stopped.  'Don't be disturbed,' he added.  'There's no ground for
+alarm.  Not of any sort.'
+
+Nataly said: 'What name?'
+
+'Her name is Mrs. Marsett.'
+
+'The name is .  .  . ?'
+
+'Captain Marsett: will be Sir Edward.  He came back from the Continent
+yesterday.'
+
+A fit of shuddering seized Nataly.  It grew in violence, and speaking out
+of it, with a pause of sickly empty chatter of the jaws, she said:
+'Always that name?'
+
+'Before the maiden name?  May have been or not.'
+
+'Not, you say?'
+
+'I don't accurately know.'
+
+Dartrey sprang to his legs.  'My dear soul!  dear friend--one of the
+best! if we go on fencing in the dark, there'll be wounds.  Your way of
+taking this affair disappointed me.  Now I understand.  It's the disease
+of a trouble, to fly at comparisons.  No real one exists.  I wished to
+protect the woman from a happier sister's judgement, to save you from
+alarm concerning Nesta:--quite groundless, if you'll believe me.  Come,
+there's plenty of benevolent writing abroad on these topics now: facts
+are more looked at, and a good woman may join us in taking them without
+the horrors and loathings of angels rather too much given to claim
+distinction from the luckless.  A girl who's unprotected may go through
+adventures before she fixes, and be a creature of honest intentions.
+Better if protected, we all agree.  Better also if the world did not
+favour the girl's multitude of enemies.  Your system of not dealing with
+facts openly is everyway favourable to them.  I am glad to say, Victor
+recognizes what corruption that spread of wealth is accountable for.
+And now I must go and have a talk with the--what a change from the blue
+butterfly!  Eaglet, I ought to have said.  I dine with you, for Victor
+may bring news.'
+
+'Would anything down there be news to you, Dartrey?'
+
+'He makes it wherever he steps.'
+
+'He would reproach me for not detaining you.  Tell Nesta I have to lie
+down after talking.  She has a child's confidence in you.'
+
+A man of middle age!  he said to himself.  It is the particular
+ejaculation which tames the senior whose heart is for a dash of holiday.
+He resolved, that the mother might trust to the discretion of a man of
+his age; and he went down to Nesta, grave with the weight his count of
+years should give him.  Seeing her, the light of what he now knew of her
+was an ennobling equal to celestial.  For this fair girl was one of the
+active souls of the world--his dream to discover in woman's form.  She,
+the little Nesta, the tall pure-eyed girl before him, was, young though
+she was, already in the fight with evil: a volunteer of the army of the
+simply Christian.  The worse for it?  Sowerby would think so.  She was
+not of the order of young women who, in sheer ignorance or in voluntary,
+consent to the peace with evil, and are kept externally safe from the
+smirch of evil, and are the ornaments of their country, glory of a
+country prizing ornaments higher than qualities.
+
+Dartrey could have been momentarily incredulous of things revealed by
+Mrs. Marsett--not incredulous of the girl's heroism: that capacity he
+caught and gauged in her shape of head, cut of mouth, and the
+measurements he was accustomed to make at a glance:--but her beauty, or
+the form of beauty which was hers, argued against her having set foot of
+thought in our fens.  Here and far there we meet a young saint vowed to
+service along by those dismal swamps: and saintly she looks; not of this
+earth.  Nesta was of the blooming earth.  Where do we meet girl or woman
+comparable to garden-flowers, who can dare to touch to lift the spotted
+of her sex?  He was puzzled by Nesta's unlikeness in deeds and in aspect.
+He remembered her eyes, on the day when he and Colonel Sudley beheld her;
+presently he was at quiet grapple with her mind.  His doubts cleared off.
+Then the question came, How could a girl of heroical character be
+attached to the man Sowerby?  That entirely passed belief.
+
+And was it possible his wishes beguiled his hearing?  Her tones were
+singularly vibrating.
+
+They talked for a while before, drawing a deep breath, she said: 'I fancy
+I am in disgrace with my mother.'
+
+'You have a suspicion why?' said he.
+
+'I have.'
+
+She would have told him why: the words were at her lips.  Previous to her
+emotion on the journey home, the words would have come out.  They were
+arrested by the thunder of the knowledge, that the nobleness in him
+drawing her to be able to speak of scarlet matter, was personally
+worshipped.
+
+He attributed the full rose upon her cheeks to the forbidding subject.
+
+To spare pain, he said: 'No misunderstanding with the dear mother will
+last the day through.  Can I help?'
+
+'Oh, Captain Dartrey!'
+
+'Drop the captain.  Dartrey will do.'
+
+'How could I!'
+
+'You're not wanting in courage, Nesta.'
+
+'Hardly for that!'
+
+'By-and-by, then.'
+
+'Though I could not say Mr. Fenellan.'
+
+'You see; Dartrey, it must be.'
+
+'If I could!'
+
+'But the fellow is not a captain: and he is a friend, an old friend, very
+old friend: he'll be tipped with grey in a year or two.'
+
+'I might be bolder then.'
+
+'Imagine it now.  There is no disloyalty in your calling your friends by
+their names.'
+
+Her nature rang to the implication.  'I am not bound.'  Dartrey hung
+fast, speculating on her visibly: 'I heard you were?'
+
+'No.  I must be free.'
+
+'It is not an engagement?'
+
+'Will you laugh?--I have never quite known.  My father desired it:
+and my desire is to please him.  I think I am vain enough to think I read
+through blinds and shutters.  The engagement--what there was--has been,
+to my reading, broken more than once.  I have not considered it, to
+settle my thoughts on it, until lately: and now I may suspect it to be
+broken.  I have given cause--if it is known.  There is no blame
+elsewhere.  I am not unhappy, Captain Dartrey.'
+
+'Captain by courtesy.  Very well.  Tell me how Nesta judges the
+engagement to be broken?'
+
+She was mentally phrasing before she said: 'Absence.'
+
+'He was here yesterday.'
+
+All that the visit embraced was in her expressive look, as of sight
+drawing inward, like our breath in a spell of wonderment.  'Then I
+understand; it enlightens me.
+
+My own mother!--my poor mother!  he should have come to me.  I was the
+guilty person, not she; and she is the sufferer.  That, if in life were
+direct retribution! but the very meaning of having a heart, is to suffer
+through others or for them.'
+
+'You have soon seen that, dear girl,' said Dartrey.
+
+'So, my own mother, and loving me as she does, blames me!' Nesta sighed;
+she took a sharp breath.  'You? do you blame me too?'
+
+He pressed her hand, enamoured of her instantaneous divination and
+heavenly candour.
+
+But he was admonished, that to speak high approval would not be
+honourable advantage taken of the rival condemning; and he said: 'Blame?
+Some think it is not always the right thing to do the right thing.  I've
+made mistakes, with no bad design.  A good mother's view is not often
+wrong.'
+
+'You pressed my hand,' she murmured.
+
+That certainly had said more.
+
+'Glad to again,' he responded.  It was uttered airily and was meant to be
+as lightly done.
+
+Nesta did not draw back her hand.  'I feel strong when you press it.'
+Her voice wavered, and as when we hear a flask sing thin at the filling,
+ceased upon evidence of a heart surcharged.  How was he to relax the
+pressure!--he had to give her the strength she craved: and he vowed it
+should be but for half a minute, half a minute longer.
+
+Her tears fell; she eyed him steadily; she had the look of sunlight in
+shower.
+
+'Oldish men are the best friends for you, I suppose,' he said; and her
+gaze turned elusive phrases to vapour.
+
+He was compelled to see the fiery core of the raincloud lighting it for a
+revealment, that allowed as little as it retained of a shadow of
+obscurity.
+
+The sight was keener than touch and the run of blood with blood to
+quicken slumbering seeds of passion.
+
+But here is the place of broken ground and tangle, which calls to
+honourable men, not bent on sport, to be wary to guard the gunlock.  He
+stopped the word at his mouth.  It was not in him to stop or moderate the
+force of his eyes.  She met them with the slender unbendingness that was
+her own; a feminine of inspirited manhood.  There was no soft expression,
+only the direct shot of light, on both sides; conveying as much as is
+borne from sun to earth, from earth to sun.  And when such an exchange
+has come between the two, they are past plighting, they are the wedded
+one.
+
+Nesta felt it, without asking whether she was loved.  She was his.  She
+had not a thought of the word of love or the being beloved.  Showers of
+painful blissfulness went through her, as the tremours of a shocked
+frame, while she sat quietly, showing scarce a sign; and after he had let
+her hand go, she had the pressure on it.  The quivering intense of the
+moment of his eyes and grasp was lord of her, lord of the day and of all
+days coming.  That is how Love slays Death.  Never did girl so give her
+soul.
+
+She would have been the last to yield it unreservedly to a man untrusted
+for the character she worshipped.  But she could have given it to
+Dartrey, despite his love of another, because it was her soul, without
+any of the cravings, except to bestow.
+
+He perceived, that he had been carried on for the number of steps which
+are countless miles and do not permit the retreat across the desert
+behind; and he was in some amazement at himself, remindful of the
+different nature of our restraining power when we have a couple playing
+on it.  Yet here was this girl, who called him up to the heights of young
+life again: and a brave girl; and she bled for the weak, had no shrinking
+from the women underfoot: for the reason, that she was a girl sovereignly
+pure, angelically tender.  Was there a point of honour to hold him back?
+
+Nataly entered the room.  She kissed Nesta, and sat silent.
+
+'Mother, will you speak of me to him, if I go out?' Nesta said.
+
+'We have spoken,' her mother replied, vexed by the unmaidenly allusion to
+that theme.
+
+She would have asked, How did you guess I knew of it?--but that the, Why
+should I speak of you to him? struck the louder note in her bosom: and
+then, What is there that this girl cannot guess!--filled the mother's
+heart with apprehensive dread: and an inward cry, What things will she
+not set going, to have them discussed.  And the appalling theme, sitting
+offensive though draped in their midst, was taken for a proof of the
+girl's unblushingness.  After standing as one woman against the world so
+long, Nataly was relieved to be on the side of a world now convictedly
+unjust to her in the confounding of her with the shameless.  Her mind had
+taken the brand of that thought:--And Nesta had brought her to it:--
+And Dudley Sowerby, a generous representative of the world, had kindly,
+having the deputed power to do so, sustained her, only partially blaming
+Nesta, not casting them off; as the world, with which Nataly felt, under
+a sense of the protection calling up all her gratitude to young Dudley,
+would have approved his doing.
+
+She was passing through a fit of the cowardice peculiar to the tediously
+strained, who are being more than commonly tried--persecuted, as they say
+when they are not supplicating their tyrannical Authority for aid.  The
+world will continue to be indifferent to their view of it and behaviour
+toward it until it ceases to encourage the growth of hypocrites.
+
+These are moments when the faces we are observing drop their charm,
+showing us our perversion internal, if we could but reflect, to see it.
+Very many thousand times above Dudley Sowerby, Nataly ranked Dartrey
+Fenellan; and still she looked at him, where he sat beside Nesta,
+ungenially, critical of the very features, jealously in the interests of
+Dudley; and recollecting, too, that she had once prayed for one exactly
+resembling Dartrey Fenellan to be her Nesta's husband.  But, as she would
+have said, that was before the indiscretion of her girl had shown her to
+require for her husband a man whose character and station guaranteed
+protection instead of inciting to rebellion.  And Dartrey, the loved and
+prized, was often in the rebel ranks; he was dissatisfied with matters as
+they are; was restless for action, angry with a country denying it to
+him; he made enemies, he would surely bring down inquiries about Nesta's
+head, and cause the forgotten or quiescent to be stirred; he would
+scarcely be the needed hand for such a quiver of the lightnings as Nesta
+was.
+
+Dartrey read Nataly's brows.  This unwonted uncomeliness of hers was an
+indication to one or other of our dusky pits, not a revealing.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX
+
+A CHAPTER IN THE SHADOW OF MRS. MARSETT
+
+He read her more closely when Arlington brought in the brown paper
+envelope of the wires--to which the mate of Victor ought to have become
+accustomed.  She took it; her eyelids closed, and her features were
+driven to whiteness.  'Only these telegrams,' she said, in apology.
+
+'Lakelands on fire?' Dartrey murmured to Nesta; and she answered: 'I
+should not be sorry.'
+
+Nataly coldly asked her why she would not be sorry.
+
+Dartrey interposed: 'I'm sure she thinks Lakelands worries her mother.'
+
+'That ranks low among the worries,' Nataly sighed, opening the envelope.
+
+Nesta touched her arm: 'Mother! even before Captain Dartrey, if you will
+let me!'--she turned to him: 'before .  .  .'  at the end of her breath
+she said: 'Dartrey Fenellan.  You shall see my whole heart, mother.'
+
+Her mother looked from her at him.
+
+'Victor returns by the last train.   He telegraphs, that he dines with--'
+She handed the paper to Dartrey.
+
+'Marsett,' he read aloud; and she flushed; she was angry with him for not
+knowing, that the name was a term of opprobrium flung at her.
+
+'It's to tell you he has done what he thought good,' said Dartrey.
+'In other words, as I interpret, he has completed his daughter's work.
+So we won't talk about it till he comes.  You have no company this
+evening?'
+
+'Oh!  there is a pause to-night!  It's nearly as unceasing as your
+brother Simeon's old French lady in the ronde with her young bridegroom,
+till they danced her to pieces.  I do get now and then an hour's repose,'
+Nataly added, with a vision springing up of the person to whom the story
+had applied.
+
+'My dear, you are a good girl to call me Dartrey,' the owner of the name
+said to Nesta.
+
+Nataly saw them both alert, in the terrible manner peculiar to both, for
+the directest of the bare statements.  She could have protested, that her
+love of truth was on an equality with theirs; and certainly, that her
+regard for decency was livelier.  Pass the deficiency in a man.  But a
+girl who could speak, by allusion, of Mrs. Marsett--of the existence of a
+Mrs. Marsett--in the presence of a man: and he excusing, encouraging: and
+this girl her own girl;--it seemed to her, that the world reeled; she
+could hardly acknowledge the girl; save under the penitential admission
+of her sin's having found her out.
+
+She sent Nesta to her room when they went upstairs to dress, unable to
+endure her presence after seeing her show a placid satisfaction at
+Dartrey's nod to the request for him to sleep in the house that night.
+It was not at all a gleam of pleasure, hardly an expression; it was a
+manner of saying, One drop more in my cup of good fortune! an absurd and
+an offensive exhibition of silly optimism of the young, blind that they
+are!
+
+For were it known, and surely the happening of it would be known,
+that Dudley Sowerby had shaken off the Nesta of no name, who was the
+abominable Mrs. Marsett's friend, a whirlwind with a trumpet would sweep
+them into the wilderness on a blast frightfuller than any ever heard.
+
+Nataly had a fit of weeping for want of the girl's embrace, against whom
+her door was jealously locked.  She hoped those two would talk much,
+madly if they liked, during dinner, that she might not be sensible,
+through any short silence, of the ardour animating them: especially
+glowing in Nesta, ready behind her quiet mask to come brazenly forth.
+But both of them were mercilessly ardent; and a sickness of the fear,
+that they might fall on her to capture her and hurry her along with them
+perforce of the allayed, once fatal, inflammable element in herself,
+shook the warmth from her limbs: causing her to say to herself aloud in a
+ragged hoarseness, very strangely: Every thought of mine now has a
+physical effect on me!
+
+They had not been two minutes together when she descended to them.  Yet
+she saw the girl's heart brimming, either with some word spoken to her or
+for joy of an unmaidenly confession.  During dinner they talked, without
+distressful pauses.  Whatever said, whatever done, was manifestly another
+drop in Nesta's foolish happy cup.  Could it be all because Dartrey
+Fenellan countenanced her acquaintance with that woman?  The mother had
+lost hold of her.  The tortured mother had lost hold of herself.
+
+Dartrey in the course of the evening, begged to hear the contralto; and
+Nataly, refusing, was astounded by the admission in her blank mind of the
+truth of man's list of charges against her sex, starting from their
+capriciousness for she could have sung in a crowded room, and she had now
+a desire for company, for stolid company or giddy, an ocean of it.  This
+led to her thinking, that the world of serious money-getters, and feasts,
+and the dance, the luxurious displays, and the reverential Sunday
+service, will always ultimately prove itself right in opposition to
+critics and rebels, and to any one vainly trying to stand alone: and the
+thought annihilated her; for she was past the age of the beginning again,
+and no footing was left for an outsider not self-justified in being where
+she stood.  She heard Dartrey's praise of Nesta's voice for tearing her
+mother's bosom with notes of intolerable sweetness; and it was haphazard
+irony, no doubt; we do not the less bleed for the accident of a shot.
+
+At last, after midnight Victor arrived.
+
+Nesta most impudently expected to be allowed to remain.  'Pray, go,
+dear,' her mother said.  Victor kissed his Fredi.  'Some time to-morrow,'
+said he; and she forbore to beseech him.
+
+He stared, though mildly, at sight of her taking Dartrey's hand for the
+good-night and deliberately putting her lips to it.
+
+Was she a girl whose notion of rectifying one wrong thing done, was to do
+another?  Nataly could merely observe.  A voice pertaining to no one
+present, said in her ear:--Mothers have publicly slapped their daughter's
+faces for less than that!--It was the voice of her incapacity to cope
+with the girl.  She watched Nesta's passage from the room, somewhat
+affected by the simple bearing for which she was reproaching her.
+
+'And our poor darling has not seen a mountain this year!' Victor
+exclaimed, to have mentionable grounds for pitying his girl.  'I promised
+Fredi she should never count a year without Highlands or Alps.  You
+remember, mama?--down in the West Highlands.  Fancy the dear bit of
+bundle, Dartrey!--we had laid her in her bed; she was about seven or
+eight; and there she lay wide awake.  "What 's Fredi thinking of?"--
+"I'm thinking of the tops of the mountains at night, dada."--She could
+climb them now; she has the legs.'
+
+Nataly said: 'You have some report to make.  You dined with those
+people?'
+
+'The Marsetts: yes:--well-suited couple enough.  It's to happen before
+Winter ends--at once; before Christmas; positively before next Spring.
+Fredi's doing!  He has to manage, arrange.--She's a good-looking woman,
+good height, well-rounded; well-behaved, too: she won't make a bad Lady
+Marsett.  Every time that woman spoke of our girl, the tears jumped to
+her eyelids.'
+
+'Come to me before you go to bed,' Nataly said, rising, her voice
+foundering; 'Good-night, Dartrey.'
+
+She turned to the door; she could not trust herself to shake hands with
+composure.  Not only was it a nauseous mixture she was forced to gulp
+from Victor, it burned like a poison.
+
+'Really Fredi's doing--chiefly,' said Victor, as soon as Dartrey and he
+were alone, comfortably settled in the smoking-room.  'I played the man
+of pomp with Marsett--good heavy kind of creature: attached to the woman.
+She's the better horse, as far as brains go.  Good enough Lady Marsett.
+I harped on Major Worrell: my daughter insulted.  He knew of it--spoke
+of you properly.  The man offered all apologies; he has told the Major
+he is no gentleman, not a fit associate for gentlemen:--quite so--and has
+cut him dead.  Will marry her, as I said, make her as worthy as he can of
+the honour of my daughter's acquaintance.  Rather comical grimace, when
+he vowed he'd fasten the tie.  He doesn't like marriage.  But, he can't
+give her up.  And she's for patronizing the institution.  But she is
+ready to say good-bye to him "rather than see the truest lady in the
+world insulted"--her words.  And so he swallows his dose for health,
+and looks a trifle sourish.  Antecedents, I suppose: has to stomach them.
+But if a man's fond of a woman--if he knows he saves her from slipping
+lower--and it's an awful world, for us to let a woman be under its
+wheels:--I say, a woman who has a man to lean on, unless she's as
+downright corrupt as two or three of the men we've known:--upon my word,
+Dartrey, I come round to some of your ideas on these matters.  It's this
+girl of mine, this wee bit of girl in her little nightshirt with the
+frill, astonishes me most:--"thinking of the tops of the mountains at
+night!"  She has positively done the whole of this work-main part.
+I smiled when I left the house, to have to own our little Fredi starting
+us all on the road.  It seems, Marsett had sworn he would; amorous vow,
+you know; he never came nearer to doing it.  I hope it's his better mind
+now; I do hope the man won't have cause to regret it.  He speaks of
+Nesta--sort of rustic tone of awe.  Mrs. Marsett has impressed him.  He
+expects the title soon, will leave the army--the poor plucked British
+army, as you call it!--and lead the life of a country squire: hunting!
+Well, it's not only the army, it's over Great Britain, with this infernal
+wealth of ours!--and all for pleasure--eh?--or Paradise lost for a sugar
+plum!  Eh, Dartrey?  Upon my word, it appears to me, Esau's the
+Englishman, Jacob the German, of these times.  I wonder old Colney hasn't
+said it.  If we're not plucked, as your regiments are of the officers who
+have learnt their work, we're emasculated:--the nation's half made-up of
+the idle and the servants of the idle.'
+
+'Ay, and your country squires and your manufacturers contrive to give the
+army a body of consumptive louts fit for nothing else than to take the
+shilling--and not worth it,' said Dartrey.
+
+'Sounds like old Colney,' Victor remarked to himself.  'But, believe me,
+I'm ashamed of the number of servants who wait on me.  It wouldn't so
+much matter, as Skepsey says, if they were trained to arms and self-
+respect.  That little fellow Skepsey's closer to the right notion,
+and the right practice, too, than any of us.  With his Matilda Pridden!
+He has jumped out of himself to the proper idea of women, too.  And
+there's a man who has been up three times before the magistrates, and is
+considered a disorderly subject--one among the best of English citizens,
+I declare!  I never think of Skepsey without the most extraordinary,
+witless kind of envy--as if he were putting in action an idea I once had
+and never quite got hold of again.  The match for him is Fredi.  She
+threatens to be just as devoted, just as simple, as he.  I positively
+doubt whether any of us could stop her, if she had set herself to do a
+thing she thought right.'
+
+'I should not like to think our trying it possible,' said Dartrey.
+
+'All very well, but it's a rock ahead.  We shall have to alter our
+course, my friend.  You know, I dined with that couple, after the private
+twenty minutes with Marsett: he formally propounded the invitation, as we
+were close on his hour, rather late: and I wanted to make the woman
+happy, besides putting a seal of cordiality on his good intentions--
+politic!  And subsequently I heard from her, that--you'll think nothing
+of it!--Fredi promised to stand by her at the altar.'
+
+Dartrey said, shrugging: 'She needn't do that.'
+
+'So we may say.  You're dealing with Nesta Victoria.  Spare me a contest
+with that girl, I undertake to manage any man or woman living.'
+
+'When the thing to be done is thought right by her.'
+
+'But can we always trust her judgement, my dear Dartrey?'
+
+'In this case, she would argue, that her resolution to keep her promise
+would bind or help to bind Marsett to fulfil his engagement.'
+
+'Odd, her mother has turned dead round in favour of that fellow Dudley
+Sowerby!  I don't complain; it suits; but one thinks--eh?--women!'
+
+'Well, yes, one thinks or should think, that if you insist on having
+women rooted to the bed of the river, they'll veer with the tides, like
+water-weeds, and no wonder.'
+
+'Your heterodoxy on that subject is a mania, Dartrey.  We can't have
+women independent.'
+
+'Then don't be exclaiming about their vagaries.'
+
+Victor mused: 'It's wonderful: that little girl of mine!--good height
+now: but what a head she has!  Oh, she'll listen to reason: only mark
+what I say:--with that quiet air of hers, the husband, if a young fellow,
+will imagine she's the most docile of wives in the world.  And as to
+wife, I'm not of the contrary opinion.  But qua individual female,
+supposing her to have laid fast hold of an idea of duty, it's he who'll
+have to turn the corner second, if they're to trot in the yoke together.
+Or it may be an idea of service to a friend--or to her sex!  That Mrs.
+Marsett says she feels for--"bleeds" for her sex.  The poor woman didn't
+show to advantage with me, because she was in a fever to please:--talks
+in jerks, hot phrases.  She holds herself well.  At the end of the dinner
+she behaved better.  Odd, you can teach women with hints and a lead.  But
+Marsett 's Marsett to the end.  Rather touching!--the poor fellow said:
+Deuce of a bad look-out for me if Judith doesn't have a child!  First-
+rate sportsman, I hear.  He should have thought of his family earlier.
+You know, Dartrey, the case is to be argued for the family as well.  You
+won't listen.  And for Society too!  Off you go.'
+
+A battery was opened on that wall of composite.
+
+'Ah, well,' said Victor.  'But I may have to beg your help, as to the
+so-called promise to stand at the altar.  I don't mention it upstairs.'
+
+He went to Nataly's room.
+
+She was considerately treated, and was aware of being dandled, that she
+might have sleep.
+
+She consented to it, in a loathing of the topic.--Those women invade us
+--we cannot keep them out!  was her inward cry: with a reverberation of
+the unfailing accompaniment: The world holds you for one of them!
+
+Victor tasked her too much when his perpetual readiness to doat upon his
+girl for whatever she did, set him exalting Nesta's conduct.  She
+thought: Was Nesta so sympathetic with her mother of late by reason of a
+moral insensibility to the offence?
+
+This was her torture through the night of a labouring heart, that
+travelled to one dull shock, again and again repeated:--the apprehended
+sound, in fact, of Dudley Sowerby's knock at the street door.  Or
+sometimes a footman handed her his letter, courteously phrased to
+withdraw from the alliance.  Or else he came to a scene with Nesta, and
+her mother was dragged into it, and the intolerable subject steamed about
+her.  The girl was visioned as deadly.  She might be indifferent to the
+protection of Dudley's name.  Robust, sanguine, Victor's child, she
+might--her mother listened to a devil's whisper--but no; Nesta's aim was
+at the heights; she was pure in mind as in body.  No, but the world would
+bring the accusation; and the world would trace the cause: Heredity, it
+would say.  Would it say falsely?  Nataly harped on the interrogation
+until she felt her existence dissolving to a dark stain of the earth, and
+she found herself wondering at the breath she drew, doubting that another
+would follow, speculating on the cruel force which keeps us to the act of
+breathing.--Though I could draw wild blissful breath if I were galloping
+across the moors!  her worn heart said to her youth: and out of ken of
+the world, I could regain a portion of my self-esteem.  Nature thereat
+renewed her old sustainment with gentle murmurs, that were supported by
+Dr. Themison's account of the virtuous married lady who chafed at the
+yoke on behalf of her sex, and deemed the independent union the ideal.
+Nataly's brain had a short gallop over moorland.  It brought her face to
+face with Victor's girl, and she dropped once more to her remorse in
+herself and her reproaches of Nesta.  The girl had inherited from her
+father something of the cataract's force which won its way by catching or
+by mastering, uprooting, ruining!
+
+In the morning she was heavily asleep.  Victor left word with Nesta,
+that the dear mother was not to be disturbed.  Consequently, when Dudley
+called to see Mrs. Victor Radnor, he was informed that Miss Radnor would
+receive him.
+
+Their interview lasted an hour.
+
+Dudley came to Victor in the City about luncheon time.
+
+His perplexity of countenance was eloquent.  He had, before seeing the
+young lady, digested an immense deal more, as it seemed to him, than any
+English gentleman should be asked to consume.  She now referred him to
+her father, who had spent a day in Brighton, and would, she said, explain
+whatever there was to be explained.  But she added, that if she was
+expected to abandon a friend, she could not.  Dudley had argued with her
+upon the nature of friendship, the measurement of its various dues; he
+had lectured on the choice of friends, the impossibility for young
+ladies, necessarily inexperienced, to distinguish the right class of
+friends, the dangers they ran in selecting friends unwarranted by the
+stamp of honourable families.
+
+'And what did Fredi say to that?' Victor inquired.
+
+'Miss Radnor said--I may be dense, I cannot comprehend--that the precepts
+were suitable for seminaries of Pharisees.  When it is a question of a
+young lady associating with a notorious woman!'
+
+'Not notorious.  You spoil your case if you "speak extremely," as a
+friend says.  I saw her yesterday.  She worships "Miss Radnor."'
+
+Nesta will know when she is older; she will thank me,' said Dudley
+hurriedly.  'As it is at present, I may reckon, I hope, that the
+association ceases.  Her name: I have to consider my family.'
+
+'Good anchorage!  You must fight it out with the girl.  And depend upon
+this--you're not the poorer for being the husband of a girl of character;
+unless you try to bridle her.  She belongs to her time.  I don't mind
+owning to you, she has given me a lead.--Fredi 'll be merry to-night.
+Here's a letter I have from the Sanfredini, dated Milan, fresh this
+morning; invitation to bring the god-child to her villa on Como in May;
+desirous to embrace her.  She wrote to the office.  Not a word of her
+duque.  She has pitched him to the winds.  You may like to carry it off
+to Fredi and please her.'
+
+'I have business,' Dudley replied.
+
+'Away to it, then!' said Victor.  'You stand by me?--we expect our South
+London borough to be open in January; early next year, at least; may be
+February.  You have family interest there.'
+
+'Personally, I will do my best,' Dudley said; and he escaped, feeling,
+with the universal censor's angry spite, that the revolutions of the
+world had made one of the wealthiest of City men the head of a set of
+Bohemians.  And there are eulogists of the modern time!  And the man's
+daughter was declared to belong to it!  A visit in May to the Italian
+cantatrice separated from her husband, would render the maiden an
+accomplished flinger of caps over the windmills.
+
+At home Victor discovered, that there was not much more than a truce
+between Nesta and Nataly.  He had a medical hint from Dr. Themison,
+and he counselled his girl to humour her mother as far as could be:
+particularly in relation to Dudley, whom Nataly now, womanlike, after
+opposing, strongly favoured.  How are we ever to get a clue to the
+labyrinthine convolutions and changeful motives of the sex!  Dartrey's
+theories were absurd.  Did Nataly think them dangerous for a young woman?
+The guess hinted at a clue of some sort to the secret of her veering.
+
+'Mr. Sowerby left me with an adieu,' said Nesta.
+
+'Mr. Sowerby!  My dear, he is bound, bound in honour, bound at heart.
+You did not dismiss him?'
+
+'I repeated the word he used.  I thought of mother.  The blood leaves her
+cheeks at a disappointment now.  She has taken to like him.'
+
+'Why, you like him!'
+
+'I could not vow.'
+
+'Tush.'
+
+'Ah, don't press me, dada.  But you will see, he has disengaged himself.'
+
+He had done it, though not in formal speech.  Slow digestion of his
+native antagonism to these Bohemians, to say nothing of his judicial
+condemnation of them, brought him painfully round to the writing of a
+letter to Nataly; cunningly addressed to the person on whom his instinct
+told him he had the strongest hold.
+
+She schooled herself to discuss the detested matter forming Dudley's
+grievance and her own with Nesta; and it was a woeful half-hour for them.
+But Nataly was not the weeper.
+
+Another interview ensued between Nesta and her suitor.  Dudley bore no
+resemblance to Mr. Barmby, who refused to take the word no from her, and
+had taken it, and had gone to do holy work, for which she revered him.
+Dudley took the word, leaving her to imagine freedom, until once more her
+mother or her father, inspired by him, came interceding, her mother
+actually supplicating.  So that the reality of Dudley's love rose to
+conception like a London dawn over Nesta; and how, honourably, decently,
+positively, to sever herself from it, grew to be an ill-visaged problem.
+She glanced in soul at Dartrey Fenellan for help; she had her wild
+thoughts.  Having once called him Dartrey, the virginal barrier to
+thoughts was broken; and but for love of her father, for love and pity of
+her mother, she would have ventured the step to make the man who had her
+whole being in charge accept or reject her.  Nothing else appeared in
+prospect.  Her father and mother were urgently one to favour Dudley; and
+the sensitive gentleman presented himself to receive his wound and to
+depart with it.  But always he returned.  At last, as if under tuition,
+he refrained from provoking a wound; he stood there to win her upon any
+terms; and he was a handsome figure, acknowledged by the damsel to be
+increasing in good looks as more and more his pretensions became
+distasteful to her.  The slight cast of sourness on his lower features
+had almost vanished, his nature seemed to have enlarged.  He complimented
+her for her 'generous benevolence,' vaguely, yet with evident
+sincereness; he admitted, that the modern world is 'attempting
+difficulties with at least commendable intentions'; and that the position
+of women demands improvement, consideration for them also.  He said
+feelingly: 'They have to bear extraordinary burdens!' There he stopped.
+
+The sharp intelligence fronting him understood, that this compassionate
+ejaculation was the point where she, too, must cry halt.  He had,
+however--still under tuition, perhaps--withdrawn his voice from the
+pursuit of her; and so she in gratitude silenced her critical mind
+beneath a smooth conceit of her having led him two steps to a broader
+tolerance.  Susceptible as she was, she did not influence him without
+being affected herself in other things than her vanity: his prudishness
+affected her.  Only when her heart flamed did she disdain that real haven
+of refuge, with its visionary mount of superiority, offered by Society to
+its effect, in the habit of ignoring the sins it fosters under cloak;--
+not less than did the naked barbaric time, and far more to the vitiation
+of the soul.  He fancied he was moulding her; therefore winning her.
+It followed, that he had the lover's desire for assurance of exclusive
+possession; and reflecting, that he had greatly pardoned, he grew
+exacting.  He mentioned his objections to some of Mr. Dartrey Fenellan's
+ideas.
+
+Nesta replied: 'I have this morning had two letters to make me happy.'
+
+A provoking evasion.  He would rather have seen antagonism bridle and
+stiffen her figure.  'Is one of them from that gentleman?'
+
+'One is from my dear friend Louise de Seilles.  She comes to me early
+next month.'
+
+'The other?'
+
+'The other is also from a friend.'
+
+'A dear friend?'
+
+'Not so dear.  Her letter gives me happiness.'
+
+'She writes--not from France: from .  .  .?  you tempt me to guess.'
+
+'She writes to tell me, that Mr. Dartrey Fenellan has helped her in a way
+to make her eternally thankful.'
+
+'The place she writes from is .  .  . ?'
+
+The drag of his lips betrayed his enlightenment insisted on doubting.
+He demanded assurance.
+
+'It matters in no degree,' she said.
+
+Dudley 'thought himself excusable for inquiring.'
+
+She bowed gently.
+
+The stings and scorpions and degrading itches of this nest of wealthy
+Bohemians enraged him.
+
+'Are you--I beg to ask--are you still:--I can hardly think it--Nesta!--
+I surely have a claim to advise:--it cannot be with your mother's
+consent:--in communication, in correspondence with .  .  . ?'
+
+Again she bowed her head; saying: 'It is true.'
+
+'With that person?'
+
+He could not but look the withering disgust of the modern world in a
+conservative gentleman who has been lured to go with it a little way,
+only to be bitten.  'I decline to believe it,' he said with forcible
+sound.
+
+'She is married,' was the rather shameless, exasperating answer.
+
+'Married or not!' he cried, and murmured: 'I have borne--.  These may be
+Mr. Dartrey Fenellan's ideas; they are not mine.  I have--Something at
+least is due to me: Ask any lady:--there are clergymen, I know, clergymen
+who are for uplifting--quite right, but not associating:--to call one of
+them a friend!  Ask any lady, any!  Your mother .  .  .'
+
+'I beg you will not distress my mother,' said Nesta.
+
+'I beg to know whether this correspondence is to continue?' said Dudley.
+
+'All my life, if I do not feel dishonoured by it.'
+
+'You are.'  He added hastily: 'Counsels of prudence--there is not a lady
+living who would tell you otherwise.  At all events, in public opinion,
+if it were known--and it would certainly be known,--a lady, wife or
+spinster, would suffer--would not escape the--at least shadow of
+defilement from relationship, any degree of intimacy with .  .  .  hard
+words are wholesome in such a case: "touch pitch," yes!  My sense is
+coherent.'
+
+'Quite,' said Nesta.
+
+'And you do not agree with me?'
+
+'I do not.'
+
+'Do you pretend to be as able to judge as I?'
+
+'In this instance, better.'
+
+'Then I retire.  I cannot retain my place here.  You may depend upon it,
+the world is not wrong when it forbids young ladies to have cognizance of
+women leading disorderly lives.'
+
+'Only the women, Mr. Sowerby?'
+
+'Men, too, of course.'
+
+'You do not exclude the men from Society.'
+
+'Oh! one reads that kind of argument in books.'
+
+'Oh! the worthy books, then.  I would read them, if I could find them.'
+
+'They are banned by self-respecting readers.'
+
+'It grieves me to think differently.'
+
+Dudley looked on this fair girl, as yet innocent girl; and contrasting
+her with the foulness of the subject she dared discuss, it seemed to him,
+that a world which did not puff at her and silence, if not extinguish,
+was in a state of liquefaction.
+
+Remembering his renewed repentances his absence, he said: 'I do hope you
+may come to see, that the views shared by your mother and me are not
+erroneous.'
+
+'But do not distress her,' Nesta implored him.  'She is not well.  When
+she has grown stronger, her kind heart will move her to receive the lady,
+so that she may not be deprived of the society of good women.  I shall
+hope she will not disapprove of me.  I cannot forsake a friend.'
+
+'I beg to say good-bye,' said Dudley.
+
+She had seen a rigidity smite him as she spoke; and so little startling
+was it, that she might have fancied it expected, save for her knowing
+herself too serious to have played at wiles to gain her ends.
+
+He 'wished her prudent advisers.'
+
+She thanked him.  'In a few days, Louise de Seilles will be here.'
+
+A Frenchwoman and Papist! was the interjection of his twist of brows.
+
+Surely I must now be free? she thought when he had covered his farewell
+under a salutation regretful in frostiness.
+
+A week later, she had the embrace of her Louise, and Armandine was made
+happy with a piece of Parisian riband.
+
+Winter was rapidly in passage: changes were visible everywhere; Earth and
+House of Commons and the South London borough exhibited them; Mrs. Burman
+was the sole exception.  To the stupefaction of physicians, in a manner
+to make a sane man ask whether she was not being retained as an
+instrument for one of the darker purposes of Providence--and where are we
+standing if we ask such things?--she held on to her thread of life.
+
+February went by.  And not a word from Themison; nor from Carling, nor
+from the Rev. Groseman Buttermore, nor from Jarniman.  That is to say,
+the two former accepted invitations to grand dinners; the two latter
+acknowledged contributions to funds in which they were interested; but
+they had apparently grown to consider Mrs. Burman as an establishment,
+one of our fixtures.  On the other hand, there was nothing to be feared
+from her.  Lakelands feared nothing: the entry into Lakelands was decreed
+for the middle of April.  Those good creatures enclosed the poor woman
+and nourished her on comfortable fiction.  So the death of the member for
+the South London borough (fifteen years younger than the veteran in
+maladies) was not to be called premature, and could by no possibility
+lead to an exposure of the private history of the candidate for his
+vacant seat.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XL
+
+AN EXPIATION
+
+Nataly had fallen to be one of the solitary who have no companionship
+save with the wound they nurse, to chafe it rather than try at healing.
+So rational a mind as she had was not long in outliving mistaken
+impressions; she could distinguish her girl's feeling, and her aim; she
+could speak on the subject with Dartrey; and still her wound bled on.
+Louise de Seilles comforted her partly, through an exaltation of Nesta.
+Mademoiselle, however, by means of a change of tone and look when Dudley
+Sowerby and Dartrey Fenellan were the themes, showed a too pronounced
+preference of the more unstable one:--or rather, the man adventurous out
+of the world's highways, whose image, as husband of such a daughter as
+hers, smote the wounded mother with a chillness.  Mademoiselle's
+occasional thrill of fervency in an allusion to Dartrey, might have
+tempted a suspicious woman to indulge suppositions, accounting for the
+young Frenchwoman's novel tenderness to England, of which Nesta proudly,
+very happily boasted.  The suspicion proposed itself, and was rejected:
+for not even the fever of an insane body could influence Nataly's
+generous character, to let her moods divert and command her thoughts of
+persons.
+
+Her thoughts were at this time singularly lucid upon everything about
+her; with the one exception of the reason why she had come to favour
+Dudley, and how it was she had been smitten by that woman at Brighton to
+see herself in her position altogether with the world's relentless,
+unexamining hard eyes.  Bitterness added, of Mrs. Marsett: She is made an
+honest woman!--And there was a strain of the lower in Nataly, to reproach
+the girl for causing the reflection to be cast on the unwedded.
+Otherwise her mind was open; she was of aid to Victor in his confusion
+over some lost Idea he had often touched on latterly.  And she was the
+one who sent him ahead at a trot under a light, by saying: 'You would
+found a new and more stable aristocracy of the contempt of luxury' when
+he talked of combatting the Jews with a superior weapon.  That being, in
+fact, as Colney Durance had pointed out to him, the weapon of self-
+conquest used by them 'before they fell away to flesh-pottery.'  Was it
+his Idea?  He fancied an aching at the back of his head when he
+speculated.  But his Idea had been surpassingly luminous, alive, a
+creation; and this came before him with the yellow skin of a Theory,
+bred, born of books.  Though Nataly's mention of the aristocracy of
+self-denying discipline struck a Lucifer in his darkness.
+
+Nesta likewise helped: but more in what she did than in what she said:
+she spoke intelligently enough to make him feel a certain increase of
+alarm, amounting to a cursory secret acknowledgement of it, both at her
+dealings with Dudley and with himself.  She so quietly displaced the lady
+visiting him at the City offices.  His girl's disregard of hostile
+weather, and her company, her talk, delighted him: still he remonstrated,
+at her coming daily.  She came: nor was there an instigation on the part
+of her mother, clearly none: her mother asked him once whether he thought
+she met the dreadful Brighton woman.  His Fredi drove constantly to walk
+back beside him Westward, as he loved to do whenever it was practicable;
+and exceeding the flattery of his possession of the gallant daughter, her
+conversation charmed him to forget a disappointment caused by the defeat
+and entire exclusion of the lady visiting him so complimentarily for his
+advice on stocks, shares, mines, et caetera.  The lady resisted; she was
+vanquished, as the shades are displaced by simple apparition of daylight.
+
+His Fredi was like the daylight to him; she was the very daylight to his
+mind, whatsoever their theme of converse for by stimulating that ready
+but vagrant mind to quit the leash of the powerful senses and be a
+ethereally excursive, she gave him a new enjoyment; which led to
+reflections--a sounding of Nature, almost a question to her, on the verge
+of a doubt.  Are we, in fact, harmonious with the Great Mother when we
+yield to the pressure of our natures for indulgence?  Is she, when
+translated into us, solely the imperious appetite?  Here was Fredi, his
+little Fredi--stately girl that she had grown, and grave, too, for all
+her fun and her sail on wings--lifting him to pleasures not followed by
+clamorous, and perfectly satisfactory, yet discomposingly violent,
+appeals to Nature.  They could be vindicated.  Or could they, when they
+would not bear a statement of the case?  He could not imagine himself
+stating it namelessly to his closest friend--not to Simeon Fenellan.  As
+for speaking to Dartrey, the notion took him with shivers:--Young Dudley
+would have seemed a more possible confidant:--and he represented the
+Puritan world.--And young Dudley was getting over Fredi's infatuation for
+the woman she had rescued: he was beginning to fancy he saw a right
+enthusiasm in it;--in the abstract; if only the fair maid would drop an
+unseemly acquaintance.  He had called at the office to say so.  Victor
+stammered the plea for him.
+
+'Never, dear father,' came the smooth answer: a shocking answer in
+contrast with the tones.  Her English was as lucid as her eyes when she
+continued up to the shock she dealt: 'Do not encourage a good man to
+waste his thoughts upon me.  I have chosen my mate, and I may never marry
+him.  I do not know whether he would marry me.  He has my soul.  I have
+no shame in saying I love him.  It is to love goodness, greatness of
+heart.  He is a respecter of women--of all women; not only the fortunate.
+He is the friend of the weaker everywhere.  He has been proved in fire.
+He does not sentimentalize over poor women, as we know who scorns people
+for doing:--and that is better than hardness, meaning kindly.  He is not
+one of the unwise advocates.  He measures the forces against them.  He
+reads their breasts.  He likes me.  He is with me in my plans.  He has
+not said, has not shown, he loves me.  It is too high a thought for me
+until I hear it.'
+
+'Has your soul!' was all that Victor could reply, while the whole
+conception of Lakelands quaked under the crumbling structure.
+
+Remonstrance, argument, a word for Dudley, swelled to his lips and sank
+in dumbness.  Her seeming intuition--if it was not a perception--of the
+point where submission to the moods of his nature had weakened his
+character, and required her defence of him, struck Victor with a serious
+fear of his girl: and it was the more illuminatingly damnatory for being
+recognized as the sentiment which no father should feel.  He tried to
+think she ought not to be so wise of the things of the world.  An effort
+to imagine a reproof, showed him her spirit through her eyes: in her
+deeds too: she had already done work on the road:--Colney Durance,
+Dartrey Fenellan, anything but sentimentalists either of them, strongly
+backing her, upholding her.  Victor could no longer so naturally name her
+Fredi.
+
+He spoke it hastily, under plea of some humorous tenderness, when he
+ventured.  When Dudley, calling on him in the City to discuss the
+candidature for the South London borough, named her Fredi, that he might
+regain a vantage of familiarity by imitating her father, it struck Victor
+as audacious.  It jarred in his recollection, though the heir of the
+earldom spoke in the tone of a lover, was really at high pitch.  He
+appeared to be appreciating her, to have suffered stings of pain; he
+offered himself; he made but one stipulation.  Victor regretfully assured
+him, he feared he could do nothing.  The thought of his entry into
+Lakelands, with Nesta Victoria refusing the foundation stone of the
+place, grew dim.
+
+But he was now canvassing for the Borough, hearty at the new business as
+the braced swimmer on seas, which instantly he became, with an end in
+view to be gained.
+
+Late one April night, expecting Nataly to have gone to bed, and Nesta to
+be waiting for him, he reached home, and found Nataly in her sitting-room
+alone.  'Nesta was tired,' she said: 'we have had a scene; she refuses
+Mr. Sowerby; I am sick of pressing it; he is very much in earnest,
+painfully; she blames him for disturbing me; she will not see the right
+course:--a mother reads her daughter!  If my girl has not guidance!--
+she means rightly, she is rash.'
+
+Nataly could not utter all that her insaneness of feeling made her think
+with regard to Victor's daughter--daughter also of the woman whom her
+hard conscience accused of inflammability.  'Here is a note from Dr.
+Themison, dear.'
+
+Victor seized it, perused, and drew the big breath.
+
+'From Themison,' he said; he coughed.
+
+'Don't think to deceive me,' said she.  'I have not read the contents,
+I know them.'
+
+'The invitation at last, for to-morrow, Sunday, four P.M.  Odd, that next
+day at eight of the evening I shall be addressing our meeting in the
+Theatre.  Simeon speaks.  Beaves Urmsing insists on coming, Tory though
+he is.  Those Tories are jollier fellows than--well, no wonder!  There
+will be no surgical .  .  .  the poor woman is very low.  A couple of
+days at the outside.  Of course, I go.'
+
+'Hand me the note, dear.'
+
+It had to be given up, out of the pocket.
+
+'But,' said Victor, 'the mention of you is merely formal.'
+
+She needed sleep: she bowed her head.
+
+Nataly was the first at the breakfast-table in the morning, a fair Sunday
+morning.  She was going to Mrs. John Cormyn's Church, and she asked Nesta
+to come with her.
+
+She returned five minutes before the hour of lunch, having left Nesta
+with Mrs. John.  Louise de Seilles undertook to bring Nesta home at the
+time she might choose.  Fenellan, Mr. Pempton, Peridon and Catkin,
+lunched and chatted.  Nataly chatted.  At a quarter to three o'clock
+Victor's carriage was at the door.  He rose: he had to keep an
+appointment.  Nataly said to him publicly: 'I come too.'  He stared and
+nodded.  In the carriage, he said: 'I'm driving to the Gardens, for a
+stroll, to have a look at the beasts.  Sort of relief.  Poor crazy woman!
+However, it 's a comfort to her: so .  .  .  !'
+
+'I like to see them,' said Nataly.  'I shall see her.  I have to do it.'
+
+Up to the gate of the Gardens Victor was arguing to dissuade his dear
+soul from this very foolish, totally unnecessary, step.  Alighting, he
+put the matter aside, for good angels to support his counsel at the final
+moment.
+
+Bears, lions, tigers, eagles, monkeys: they suggested no more than he
+would have had from prints; they sprang no reflection, except, that the
+coming hour was a matter of indifference to them.  They were about him,
+and exercised so far a distraction.  He took very kindly to an old mother
+monkey, relinquishing her society at sight of Nataly's heave of the
+bosom.  Southward, across the park, the dread house rose.  He began
+quoting Colney Durance with relish while sarcastically confuting the
+cynic, who found much pasture in these Gardens.  Over Southward, too, he
+would be addressing a popular assembly to-morrow evening.  Between now
+and then there was a ditch to jump.  He put on the sympathetic face of
+grief.  'After all, a caged wild beast hasn't so bad a life,' he said.
+--To be well fed while they live, and welcome death as a release from the
+maladies they develop in idleness, is the condition of wealthy people:--
+creatures of prey? horrible thought! yet allied to his Idea, it seemed.
+Yes, but these good caged beasts here set them an example, in not
+troubling relatives and friends when they come to the gasp!  Mrs.
+Burman's invitation loomed as monstrous--a final act of her cruelty.
+His skin pricked with dews.  He thought of Nataly beside him, jumping
+the ditch with him, as a relief--if she insisted on doing it.  He hoped
+she would not, for the sake of her composure.
+
+It was a ditch void of bottom.  But it was a mere matter of an hour,
+less.  The state of health of the invalid could bear only a few minutes.
+In any case, we are sure that the hour will pass.  Our own arrive?
+Certainly.
+
+'Capital place for children,' he exclaimed.  And here startlingly before
+him in the clusters of boys and girls, was the difference between young
+ones and their elders feeling quite as young: the careless youngsters
+have not to go and sit in the room with a virulent old woman, and express
+penitence and what not, and hear words of pardon, after their holiday
+scamper and stare at the caged beasts.
+
+Attention to the children precipitated him upon acquaintances, hitherto
+cleverly shunned.  He nodded them off, after the brightest of greetings.
+
+Such anodyne as he could squeeze from the incarcerated wild creatures,
+was exhausted.  He fell to work at Nataly's 'aristocracy of the contempt
+of luxury'; signifying, that we the wealthy will not exist to pamper
+flesh, but we live for the promotion of brotherhood:--ay, and that our
+England must make some great moral stand, if she is not to fall to the
+rear and down.  Unuttered, it caught the skirts of the Idea: it
+evaporated when spoken.  Still, this theme was almost an exorcism
+of Mrs. Burman.  He consulted his watch.  'Thirteen minutes to four.
+I must be punctual,' he said.  Nataly stepped faster.
+
+Seated in the carriage, he told her he had never felt the horror of that
+place before.  'Put me down at the corner of the terrace, dear: I won't
+drive to the door.'
+
+'I come with you, Victor,' she replied.
+
+After entreaties and reasons intermixed, to melt her resolve, he saw she
+was firm: and he asked himself, whether he might not be constitutionally
+better adapted to persuade than to dissuade.  The question thumped.
+Having that house of drugs in view, he breathed more freely for the
+prospect of feeling his Nataly near him beneath the roof.
+
+'You really insist, dear love?' he appealed to her: and her answer: 'It
+must be,' left no doubt: though he chose to say: 'Not because of standing
+by me?' And she said: 'For my peace, Victor.'  They stepped to the
+pavement.  The carriage was dismissed.
+
+Seventeen houses of the terrace fronting the park led to the funereal
+one: and the bell was tolled in the breast of each of the couple
+advancing with an air of calmness to the inevitable black door.
+
+Jarniman opened it.  'His mistress was prepared to see them.'--Not like
+one near death.--They were met in the hall by the Rev. Groseman
+Buttermore.  'You will find a welcome,' was his reassurance to them:
+gently delivered, on the stoop of a large person.  His whispered tones
+were more agreeably deadening than his words.
+
+Mr. Buttermore ushered them upstairs.
+
+'Can she bear it?' Victor said, and heard: 'Her wish ten minutes.'
+
+'Soon over,' he murmured to Nataly, with a compassionate exclamation for
+the invalid.
+
+They rounded the open door.  They were in the drawing-room.  It was
+furnished as in the old time, gold and white, looking new; all the same
+as of old, save for a division of silken hangings; and these were pale
+blue: the colour preferred by Victor for a bedroom.  He glanced at the
+ceiling, to bathe in a blank space out of memory.  Here she lived,--
+here she slept, behind the hangings.  There was refreshingly that little
+difference in the arrangement of the room.  The corner Northward was
+occupied by the grand piano; and Victor had an inquiry in him:--tuned?
+He sighed, expecting a sight to come through the hangings.  Sensible that
+Nataly trembled, he perceived the Rev. Groseman Buttermore half across a
+heap of shawl-swathe on the sofa.
+
+Mrs. Burman was present; seated.  People may die seated; she had always
+disliked the extended posture; except for the night's rest, she used to
+say; imagining herself to be not inviting the bolt of sudden death, in
+her attitude when seated by day:--and often at night the poor woman had
+to sit up for the qualms of her dyspepsia!--But I 'm bound to think
+humanely, be Christian, be kind, benignant, he thought, and he fetched
+the spirit required, to behold her face emerge from a pale blue silk
+veiling; as it were, the inanimate wasted led up from the mould by
+morning.
+
+Mr. Buttermore signalled to them to draw near.
+
+Wasted though it was, the face of the wide orbits for sunken eyes was
+distinguishable as the one once known.  If the world could see it and
+hear, that it called itself a man's wife!  She looked burnt out.
+
+Two chairs had been sent to front the sofa.  Execution there!  Victor
+thought, and he garrotted the unruly mind of a man really feeling
+devoutness in the presence of the shadow thrown by the dread Shade.
+
+'Ten minutes,' Mr. Buttermore said low, after obligingly placing them on
+the chairs.
+
+He went.  They were alone with Mrs. Burman.
+
+No voice came.  They were unsure of being seen by the floating grey of
+eyes patient to gaze from their vast distance.  Big drops fell from
+Nataly's.  Victor heard the French timepiece on the mantel-shelf, where a
+familiar gilt Cupid swung for the seconds: his own purchase.  The time of
+day on the clock was wrong; the Cupid swung.
+
+Nataly's mouth was taking breath of anguish at moments.  More than a
+minute of the terrible length of the period of torture must have gone:
+two, if not three.
+
+A quaver sounded.  'You have come.'  The voice was articulate, thinner
+than the telephonic, trans-Atlantic by deep-sea cable.
+
+Victor answered: 'We have.'
+
+Another minute must have gone in the silence.  And when we get to five
+minutes we are on the descent, rapidly counting our way out of the house,
+into the fresh air, where we were half an hour back, among those happy
+beasts in the pleasant Gardens!
+
+Mrs. Burman's eyelids shut.  'I said you would come.'
+
+Victor started to the fire-screen.  'Your sight requires protection.'
+
+She dozed.  'And Natalia Dreighton !' she next said.
+
+They were certainly now on the five minutes.  Now for the slide downward
+and outward!  Nataly should never have been allowed to come.
+
+'The white waistcoat!' struck his ears.
+
+'Old customs with me, always!' he responded.  'The first of April,
+always.  White is a favourite.  Pale blue, too.  But I fear--I hope you
+have not distressing nights?  In my family we lay great stress on the
+nights we pass.  My cousins, the Miss Duvidneys, go so far as to judge of
+the condition of health by the nightly record.'
+
+'Your daughter was in their house.'
+
+She knew everything!
+
+'Very fond of my daughter--the ladies,' he remarked.
+
+'I wish her well.'
+
+'You are very kind.'
+
+Mrs. Burman communed within or slept.  'Victor, Natalia, we will pray,'
+she said.
+
+Her trembling hands crossed their fingers.  Nataly slipped to her knees.
+
+The two women mutely praying, pulled Victor into the devotional hush.  It
+acted on him like the silent spell of service in a Church.  He forgot his
+estimate of the minutes, he formed a prayer, he refused to hear the Cupid
+swinging, he droned a sound of sentences to deaden his ears.  Ideas of
+eternity rolled in semblance of enormous clouds.  Death was a black bird
+among them.  The piano rang to Nataly's young voice and his.  The gold
+and white of the chairs welcomed a youth suddenly enrolled among the
+wealthy by an enamoured old lady on his arm.  Cupid tick-ticked.--Poor
+soul! poor woman!  How little we mean to do harm when we do an injury!
+An incomprehensible world indeed at the bottom and at the top.  We get
+on fairly at the centre.  Yet it is there that we do the mischief making
+such a riddle of the bottom and the top.  What is to be said!  Prayer
+quiets one.  Victor peered at Nataly fervently on her knees and Mrs.
+Burman bowed over her knotted fingers.  The earnestness of both enforced
+an effort at a phrased prayer in him.  Plungeing through a wave of the
+scent of Marechale, that was a tremendous memory to haul him backward and
+forward, he beheld his prayer dancing across the furniture; a diminutive
+thin black figure, elvish, irreverent, appallingly unlike his proper
+emotion; and he brought his hands just to touch, and got to the edge of
+his chair, with split knees.  At once the figure vanished.  By merely
+looking at Nataly, he passed into her prayer.  A look at Mrs. Burman made
+it personal, his own.  He heard the cluck of a horrible sob coming from
+him.  After a repetition of his short form of prayer deeply stressed, he
+thanked himself with the word 'sincere,' and a queer side-thought on our
+human susceptibility to the influence of posture.  We are such creatures.
+
+Nataly resumed her seat.  Mrs. Burman had raised her head.  She said: 'We
+are at peace.'  She presently said, with effort: 'It cannot last with me.
+I die in nature's way.  I would bear forgiveness with me, that I may have
+it above.  I give it here, to you, to all.  My soul is cleansed, I trust.
+Much was to say.  My strength will not.  Unto God, you both!'
+
+The Rev. Groseman Buttermore was moving on slippered step to the back of
+the sofa.  Nataly dropped before the unseeing, scarce breathing, lady for
+an instant.  Victor murmured an adieu, grateful for being spared the
+ceremonial shake of hands.  He turned away, then turned back, praying for
+power to speak, to say that he had found his heart, was grateful, would
+hold her in memory.  He fell on a knee before her, and forgot he had done
+so when he had risen.  They were conducted by the Rev. gentleman to the
+hall-door: he was not speechless.  Jarniman uttered something.
+
+That black door closed behind them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLI
+
+THE NIGHT OF THE GREAT UNDELIVERED SPEECH
+
+To a man issuing from a mortuary where a skull had voice, London may be
+restorative as air of Summer Alps.  It is by contrast blooming life.
+Observe the fellowship of the houses shoulder to shoulder; and that
+straight ascending smoke of the preparation for dinner; and the good
+policeman yonder, blessedly idle on an orderly Sabbath evening; and the
+families of the minor people trotting homeward from the park to tea; here
+and again an amiable carriage of the superimposed people driving to pay
+visits; they are so social, friendly, inviting to him; they strip him of
+the shroud, sing of the sweet old world.  He cannot but be moved to the
+extremity of the charitableness neighbouring on tears.
+
+A stupefaction at the shock of the positive reminder, echo of the fact
+still shouting in his breast, that he had seen Mrs. Burman, and that the
+interview was over--the leaf turned and the book shut held Victor in a
+silence until his gratefulness to London City was borne down by the more
+human burst of gratitude to the dying woman, who had spared him, as much
+as she could, a scene of the convulsive pathetic, and had not called on
+him for any utterance of penitence.  That worm-like thread of voice came
+up to him still from sexton-depths: it sounded a larger forgiveness
+without the word.  He felt the sorrow of it all, as he told Nataly; at
+the same time bidding her smell 'the marvellous oxygen of the park.'  He
+declared it to be quite equal to Lakelands.
+
+She slightly pressed his arm for answer.  Perhaps she did not feel so
+deeply?  She was free of the horrid associations with the scent of
+Marechale.  At any rate, she had comported herself admirably!
+
+Victor fancied he must have shuddered when he passed by Jarniman at the
+door, who was almost now seeing his mistress's ghost--would have the
+privilege to-morrow.  He called a cab and drove to Mrs. John Cormyn's,
+at Nataly's request, for Nesta and mademoiselle: enjoying the Londonized
+odour of the cab.  Nataly did not respond to his warm and continued
+eulogies of Mrs. Burman; she rather disappointed him.  He talked of the
+gold and white furniture, he just alluded to the Cupid: reserving his
+mental comment, that the time-piece was all astray, the Cupid regular on
+the swing:--strange, touching, terrible, if really the silly gilt figure
+symbolized!  .  .  .  And we are a silly figure to be sitting in a cab
+imagining such things!--When Nesta and mademoiselle were opposite, he had
+the pleasure to see Nataly take Nesta's hand and hold it until they
+reached home.  Those two talking together in the brief words of their
+deep feeling, had tones that were singularly alike: the mezzo-soprano
+filial to the divine maternal contralto.  Those two dear ones mounted to
+Nataly's room.
+
+The two dear ones showed themselves heart in heart together once more;
+each looked the happier for it.  Dartrey was among their dinner-guests,
+and Nataly took him to her little blue-room before she went to bed.  He
+did not speak of their conversation to Victor, but counselled him to keep
+her from excitement.  'My dear fellow, if you had seen her with Mrs.
+Burman!'  Victor said, and loudly praised her coolness.  She was never
+below a situation, he affirmed.
+
+He followed his own counsel to humour his Nataly.  She began panting at a
+word about Mr. Barmby's ready services.  When, however, she related the
+state of affairs between Dartrey and Nesta, by the avowal of each of them
+to her, he said, embracing her: 'Your wisdom shall guide us, my love,'
+and almost extinguished a vexation by concealing it.
+
+She sighed: 'If one could think, that a girl with Nesta's revolutionary
+ideas of the duties of women, and their powers, would be safe--or at all
+rightly guided by a man who is both one of the noblest and the wildest in
+the ideas he entertains!'
+
+Victor sighed too.  He saw the earldom, which was to dazzle the gossips,
+crack on the sky in a futile rocket-bouquet.
+
+She was distressed; she moaned: 'My girl!  my girl: I should wish to
+leave her with one who is more fixed--the old-fashioned husband.  New
+ideas must come in politics, but in Society!--and for women!  And the
+young having heads, are the most endangered.  Nesta vows her life to it!
+Dartrey supports her!'
+
+'See Colney,' said Victor.  'Odd, Colney does you good; some queer way he
+has.  Though you don't care for his RIVAL TONGUES,--and the last number
+was funny, with Semhians on the Pacific, impressively addressing a
+farewell to his cricket-bat, before he whirls it away to Neptune--and the
+blue hand of his nation's protecting God observed to seize it!--Dead
+failure with the public, of course!  However, he seems to seem wise with
+you.  The poor old fellow gets his trouncing from the critics monthly.
+See Colney to-morrow, my love.  Now go to sleep.  We have got over the
+worst.  I speak at my Meeting to-morrow and am a champagne-bottle of
+notes and points for them.'
+
+His lost Idea drew close to him in sleep: or he thought so, when awaking
+to the conception of a people solidified, rich and poor, by the common
+pride of simple manhood.  But it was not coloured, not a luminous globe:
+and the people were in drab, not a shining army on the march to meet the
+Future.  It looked like a paragraph in a newspaper, upon which a Leading
+Article sits, dutifully arousing the fat worm of sarcastic humour under
+the ribs of cradled citizens, with an exposure of its excellent folly.
+He would not have it laughed at; still he could not admit it as more than
+a skirt of the robe of his Idea.  For let none think him a mere City
+merchant, millionnaire, boon-fellow, or music-loving man of the world.
+He had ideas to shoot across future Ages;--provide against the shrinkage
+of our Coal-beds; against, and for, if you like, the thickening,
+jumbling, threatening excess of population in these Islands, in Europe,
+America, all over our habitable sphere.  Now that Mrs. Burman, on her way
+to bliss, was no longer the dungeon-cell for the man he would show
+himself to be, this name for successes, corporate nucleus of the
+enjoyments, this Victor Montgomery Radnor, intended impressing himself
+upon the world as a factory of ideas.  Colney's insolent charge, that
+the English have no imagination--a doomed race, if it be true!--would be
+confuted.  For our English require but the lighted leadership to come
+into cohesion, and step ranked, and chant harmoniously the song of their
+benevolent aim.  And that astral head giving, as a commencement, example
+of the right use of riches, the nation is one, part of the riddle of the
+future solved.
+
+Surely he had here the Idea?  He had it so warmly, that his bath-water
+heated.  Only the vision was wanted.
+
+On London Bridge he had seen it--a great thing done to the flash of
+brilliant results.  That was after a fall.
+
+There had been a fall also of the scheme of Lakelands.
+
+Come to us with no superstitious whispers of indications and
+significations in the fall!--But there had certainly been a moral fall,
+fully to the level of the physical, in the maintaining of that scheme of
+Lakelands, now ruined by his incomprehensible Nesta--who had saved him
+from falling further.  His bath-water chilled.  He jumped out and rubbed
+furiously with his towels and flesh-brushes, chasing the Idea for simple
+warmth, to have Something inside him, to feel just that sustainment; with
+the cry: But no one can say I do not love my Nataly!  And he tested it to
+prove it by his readiness to die for her: which is heroically easier than
+the devotedly living, and has a weight of evidence in our internal Courts
+for surpassing the latter tedious performance.
+
+His Nesta had knocked Lakelands to pieces.  Except for the making of
+money, the whole year of an erected Lakelands, notwithstanding
+uninterrupted successes, was a blank.  Or rather we have to wish it were
+a blank.  The scheme departs: payment for the enlisted servants of it is
+in prospect.  A black agent, not willingly enlisted, yet pointing to
+proofs of service, refuses payment in ordinary coin; and we tell him we
+owe him nothing, that he is not a man of the world, has no understanding
+of Nature: and still the fellow thumps and alarums at a midnight door we
+are astonished to find we have in our daylight house.  How is it?  Would
+other men be so sensitive to him?  Victor was appeased by the assurance
+of his possession of an exceptionally scrupulous conscience; and he
+settled the debate by thinking: 'After all, for a man like me, battling
+incessantly, a kind of Vesuvius, I must have--can't be starved, must be
+fed--though, pah!  But I'm not to be questioned like other men.--But how
+about an aristocracy of the contempt of distinctions?--But there is no
+escaping distinctions!  my aristocracy despises indulgence.--And
+indulges?--Say, an exceptional nature!  Supposing a certain beloved woman
+to pronounce on the case?--She cannot: no woman can be a just judge of
+it.'---He cried: My love of her is testified by my having Barmby handy to
+right her to-day, tomorrow, the very instant the clock strikes the hour
+of my release!
+
+Mention of the clock swung that silly gilt figure.  Victor entered into
+it, condemned to swing, and be a thrall.  His intensity of sensation
+launched him on an eternity of the swinging in ridiculous nakedness to
+the measure of time gone crazy.  He had to correct a reproof of Mrs.
+Burman, as the cause of the nonsense.  He ran down to breakfast, hopeing
+he might hear of that clock stopped, and that sickening motion with it.
+
+Another letter from the Sanfredini in Milan, warmly inviting to her villa
+over Como, acted on him at breakfast like the waving of a banner.  'We
+go,' Victor said to Nataly, and flattered-up a smile about her lips--too
+much a resurrection smile.  There was talk of the Meeting at the theatre:
+Simeon Fenellan had spoken there in the cause of the deceased Member, was
+known, and was likely to have a good reception.  Fun and enthusiasm might
+be expected.
+
+'And my darling will hear her husband speak to-night,' he whispered as he
+was departing; and did a mischief, he had to fear, for a shadowy knot
+crossed Nataly's forehead, she seemed paler.  He sent back Nesta and
+mademoiselle, in consequence, at the end of the Green Park.
+
+Their dinner-hour was early; Simeon Fenellan, Colney Durance, and Mr.
+Peridon--pleasing to Nataly for his faithful siege of the French
+fortress--were the only guests.  When they rose, Nataly drew Victor
+aside.  He came dismayed to Nesta.  She ran to her mother.  'Not hear
+papa speak?  Oh, mother, mother!  Then I stay with her.  But can't she
+come?  He is going to unfold ideas to us.  There!'
+
+'My naughty girl is not to poke her fun at orators,' Nataly said.
+'No, dearest; it would agitate me to go.  I'm better here.  I shall be at
+peace when the night is over.'
+
+'But you will be all alone here, dear mother.'
+
+Nataly's eyes wandered to fall on Colney.  He proposed to give her his
+company.  She declined it.  Nesta ventured another entreaty, either that
+she might be allowed to stay or have her mother with her at the Meeting.
+
+'My love,' Nataly said, 'the thought of the Meeting--' She clasped at her
+breast; and she murmured: 'I shall be comforted by your being with him.
+There is no danger there.  But I shall be happy, I shall be at peace when
+this night is over.'
+
+Colney persuaded her to have him for companion.  Mr. Peridon, who was to
+have driven with Nesta and mademoiselle, won admiration by proposing to
+stay for an hour and play some of Mrs. Radnor's favourite pieces.  Nesta
+and Victor overbore Nataly's objections to the lover's generosity.  So
+Mr. Peridon was left.  Nesta came hurrying back from the step of the
+carriage to kiss her mother again, saying: 'Just one last kiss, my own!
+And she's not to look troubled.  I shall remember everything to tell my
+own mother.  It will soon be over.'
+
+Her mother nodded; but the embrace was passionate.
+
+Nesta called her father into the passage, bidding him prohibit any
+delivery to her mother of news at the door.  'She is easily startled now
+by trifles--you have noticed?'
+
+Victor summoned his recollections and assured her he had noticed, as he
+believed he had 'The dear heart of her is fretting for the night to be
+over!  And think! seven days, and she is in Lakelands.  A fortnight, and
+we have our first Concert.  Durandarte!  Oh, the dear heart 'll be at
+peace when I tell her of a triumphant Meeting.  Not a doubt of that, even
+though Colney turns the shadow of his back on us.'
+
+'One critic the less for you!' said Nesta.  Skepsey was to meet her
+carriage at the theatre.
+
+Ten minutes later, Victor and Simeon Fenellan were proceeding thitherward
+on foot.
+
+'I have my speech,' said Victor.  'You prepare the way for me, following
+our influential friend Dubbleson; Colewort winds up; any one else they
+shout for.  We shall have a great evening.  I suspect I shall find
+Themison or Jarniman when I get home.  You don't believe in intimations?
+I've had crapy processions all day before my eyes.  No wonder, after
+yesterday!'
+
+'Dubbleson mustn't drawl it out too long,' said Fenellan.
+
+'We 'll drop a hint.  Where's Dartrey?'
+
+'He'll come.  He's in one of his black moods: not temper.  He's got a
+notion he killed his wife by dragging her to Africa with him.  She was
+not only ready to go, she was glad to go.  She had a bit of the heroine
+in her and a certainty of tripping to the deuce if she was left to
+herself.'
+
+'Tell Nataly that,' said Victor.  'And tell her about Dartrey.  Harp on
+it.  Once she was all for him and our girl.  But it's a woman--though the
+dearest!  I defy any one to hit on the cause of their changes.  We must
+make the best of things, if we're for swimming.  The task for me to-night
+will be, to keep from rolling out all I've got in my head.  And I'm not
+revolutionary, I'm for stability.  Only I do see, that the firm stepping-
+place asks for a long stride to be taken.  One can't get the English to
+take a stride--unless it's for a foot behind them: bother old Colney!
+Too timid, or too scrupulous, down we go into the mire.  There!--But I
+want to say it!  I want to save the existing order.  I want,
+Christianity, instead of the Mammonism we 're threatened with.
+Great fortunes now are becoming the giants of old to stalk the land: or
+mediaeval Barons.  Dispersion of wealth, is the secret.  Nataly's of that
+mind with me.  A decent poverty!  She's rather wearying, wants a change.
+I've a steam-yacht in my eye, for next month on the Mediterranean.  All
+our set.  She likes quiet.  I believe in my political recipe for it.'
+
+He thumped on a method he had for preserving aristocracy--true
+aristocracy, amid a positively democratic flood of riches.
+
+'It appears to me, you're on the road of Priscilla Graves and Pempton,'
+observed Simeon.  'Strike off Priscilla's viands and friend Pempton's
+couple of glasses, and there's your aristocracy established; but with
+rather a dispersed recognition of itself.'
+
+'Upon my word, you talk like old Colney, except for a twang of your own,'
+said Victor.  'Colney sours at every fresh number of that Serial.  The
+last, with Delphica detecting the plot of Falarique, is really not so
+bad.  The four disguised members of the Comedie Francaise on board the
+vessel from San Francisco, to declaim and prove the superior merits of
+the Gallic tongue, jumped me to bravo the cleverness.  And Bobinikine
+turning to the complexion of the remainder of cupboard dumplings
+discovered in an emigrant's house-to-let!  And Semhians--I forget what
+and Mytharete's forefinger over the bridge of his nose, like a pensive
+vulture on the skull of a desert camel!  But, I complain, there's nothing
+to make the English love the author; and it's wasted, he's basted, and
+the book 'll have no sale.  I hate satire.'
+
+'Rough soap for a thin skin, Victor.  Does it hurt our people much?'
+
+'Not a bit; doesn't touch them.  But I want my friends to succeed!'
+
+Their coming upon Westminster Bridge changed the theme.  Victor wished
+the Houses of Parliament to catch the beams of sunset.  He deferred to
+the suggestion, that the Hospital's doing so seemed appropriate.
+
+'I'm always pleased to find a decent reason for what is,' he said.  Then
+he queried: 'But what is, if we look at it, and while we look, Simeon?
+She may be going--or she's gone already, poor woman!  I shall have that
+scene of yesterday everlastingly before my eyes, like a drop-curtain.
+Only, you know, Simeon, they don't feel the end, as we in health imagine.
+Colney would say, we have the spasms and they the peace.  I 've a mind to
+send up to Regent's Park with inquiries.  It would look respectful.  God
+forgive me!--the poor woman perverts me at every turn.  Though I will
+say, a certain horror of death I had--she whisked me out of it yesterday.
+I don't feel it any longer.  What are you jerking at?'
+
+'Only to remark, that if the thing's done for us, we haven't it so much
+on our sensations.'
+
+'More, if we're sympathetic.  But that compels us to be philosophic--or
+who could live!  Poor woman!'
+
+'Waft her gently, Victor!'
+
+'Tush!  Now for the South side of the Bridges; and I tell you, Simeon,
+what I can't mention to-night: I mean to enliven these poor dear people
+on their forsaken South of the City.  I 've my scheme.  Elected or not,
+I shall hardly be accused of bribery when I put down my first
+instalment.'
+
+Fenellan went to work with that remark in his brain for the speech he was
+to deliver.  He could not but reflect on the genial man's willingness and
+capacity to do deeds of benevolence, constantly thwarted by the position
+into which he had plunged himself.
+
+They were received at the verge of the crowd outside the theatre-doors by
+Skepsey, who wriggled, tore and clove a way for them, where all were
+obedient, but the numbers lumped and clogged.  When finally they reached
+the stage, they spied at Nesta's box, during the thunder of the rounds of
+applause, after shaking hands with Mr. Dubbleson, Sir Abraham Quatley,
+Dudley Sowerby, and others; and with Beaves Urmsing--a politician 'never
+of the opposite party to a deuce of a funny fellow!--go anywhere to hear
+hhm,' he vowed.
+
+'Miss Radnor and Mademoiselle de Seilles arrived quite safely,' said
+Dudley, feasting on the box which contained them and no Dartrey Fenellan
+in it.
+
+Nesta was wondering at Dartrey's absence.  Not before Mr. Dubbleson, the
+chairman, the 'gentleman of local influence,' had animated the drowsed
+wits and respiratory organs of a packed audience by yielding place to
+Simeon, did Dartrey appear.  Simeon's name was shouted, in proof of the
+happy explosion of his first anecdote, as Dartrey took seat behind Nesta.
+'Half an hour with the dear mother,' he said.
+
+Nesta's eyes thanked him.  She pressed the hand of a demure young woman
+sitting close behind.  Louise de Seilles.  'You know Matilda Pridden.'
+
+Dartrey held his hand out.  'Has she forgiven me?'
+
+Matilda bowed gravely, enfolding her affirmative in an outline of the no
+need for it, with perfect good breeding.  Dartrey was moved to think
+Skepsey's choice of a woman to worship did him honour.  He glanced at
+Louise.  Her manner toward Matilda Pridden showed her sisterly with
+Nesta.  He said: 'I left Mr. Peridon playing.--A little anxiety to hear
+that the great speech of the evening is done; it's nothing else.  I'll
+run to her as soon as it's over.'
+
+'Oh, good of you!  And kind of Mr. Peridon!'  She turned to Louise, who
+smiled at the simple art of the exclamation, assenting.
+
+Victor below, on the stage platform, indicated the waving of a hand
+to them, and his delight at Simeon's ringing points: which were, to
+Dartrey's mind, vacuously clever and crafty.  Dartrey despised effects
+of oratory, save when soldiers had to be hurled on a mark--or citizens
+nerved to stand for their country.
+
+Nesta dived into her father's brilliancy of appreciation, a trifle pained
+by Dartrey's aristocratic air when he surveyed the herd of heads agape
+and another cheer rang round.  He smiled with her, to be with her, at a
+hit here and there; he would not pretend an approval of this manner of
+winning electors to consider the country's interests and their own.  One
+fellow in the crowded pit, affecting a familiarity with Simeon, that
+permitted the taking of liberties with the orator's Christian name,
+mildly amused him.  He had no objection to hear 'Simmy' shouted, as
+Louise de Seilles observed.  She was of his mind, in regard to the rough
+machinery of Freedom.
+
+Skepsey entered the box.
+
+'We shall soon be serious, Miss Nesta,' he said, after a look at Matilda
+Pridden.
+
+There was a prolonged roaring--on the cheerful side.
+
+'And another word about security that your candidate will keep his
+promises,' continued Simeon: 'You have his word, my friends!'  And he
+told the story of the old Governor of Goa, who wanted money and summoned
+the usurers, and they wanted security; whereupon he laid his Hidalgo hand
+on a cataract of Kronos-beard across his breast, and pulled forth three
+white hairs, and presented them: 'And as honourably to the usurious Jews
+as to the noble gentleman himself, that security was accepted!'
+
+Emerging from hearty clamours, the illustrative orator fell upon the
+question of political specifics:--Mr. Victor Radnor trusted to English
+good sense too profoundly to be offering them positive cures, as they
+would hear the enemy say he did.  Yet a bit of a cure may be offered,
+if we 're not for pushing it too far, in pursuit of the science of
+specifics, in the style of the foreign physician, probably Spanish,
+who had no practice, and wished for leisure to let him prosecute his
+anatomical and other investigations to discover his grand medical
+nostrum.  So to get him fees meanwhile he advertised a cure for
+dyspepsia--the resource of starving doctors.  And sure enough his patient
+came, showing the grand fat fellow we may be when we carry more of the
+deciduously mortal than of the scraggy vital upon our persons.  Any one
+at a glance would have prescribed water-cresses to him: water-cresses
+exclusively to eat for a fortnight.  And that the good physician did.
+Away went his patient, returning at the end of the fortnight, lean, and
+with the appetite of a Toledo blade for succulent slices.  He vowed he
+was the man.  Our estimable doctor eyed him, tapped at him, pinched his
+tender parts; and making him swear he was really the man, and had eaten
+nothing whatever but unadulterated water-cresses in the interval, seized
+on him in an ecstasy by the collar of his coat, pushed him into the
+surgery, knocked him over, killed him, cut him up, and enjoyed the
+felicity of exposing to view the very healthiest patient ever seen under
+dissecting hand, by favour of the fortunate discovery of the specific for
+him.  All to further science!--to which, in spite of the petitions of all
+the scientific bodies of the civilized world, he fell a martyr on the
+scaffold, poor gentleman!  But we know politics to be no such empirical
+science.
+
+Simeon ingeniously interwove his analogy.  He brought it home to Beaves
+Urmsing, whose laugh drove any tone of apology out of it.  Yet the orator
+was asked: 'Do you take politics for a joke, Simmy?'
+
+He countered his questioner: 'Just to liberate you from your moribund
+state, my friend.'  And he told the story of the wrecked sailor, found
+lying on the sands, flung up from the foundered ship of a Salvation
+captain, and how, that nothing could waken him, and there he lay fit for
+interment; until presently a something of a voice grew down into his
+ears; and it was his old chum Polly, whom he had tied to a board to give
+her a last chance in the surges; and Polly shaking the wet from her
+feathers, and shouting: 'Polly tho dram dry!'--which struck on the nob of
+Jack's memory, to revive all the liquorly tricks of the cabin under
+Salvationism, and he began heaving, and at last he shook in a lazy way,
+and then from sputter to sputter got his laugh loose; and he sat up, and
+cried; 'That did it!  Now to business!' for he was hungry.  'And when I
+catch the ring of this world's laugh from you, my friend .  .  .  !'
+Simeon's application of the story was drowned.
+
+After the outburst, they heard his friend again interruptingly: 'You keep
+that tongue of yours from wagging, as it did when you got round the old
+widow woman for her money, Simmy !'
+
+Victor leaned forward.  Simeon towered.  He bellowed
+
+'And you keep that tongue of yours from committing incest on a lie!'
+
+It was like a lightning-flash in the theatre.  The man went under.
+Simeon flowed.  Conscience reproached him with the little he had done for
+Victor, and he had now his congenial opportunity.
+
+Up in the box, the powers of the orator were not so cordially esteemed.
+To Matilda Pridden, his tales were barely decently the flesh and the
+devil smothering a holy occasion to penetrate and exhort.  Dartrey sat
+rigid, as with the checked impatience for a leap.  Nesta looked at Louise
+when some one was perceived on the stage bending to her father: It was
+Mr. Peridon; he never once raised his face.  Apparently he was not
+intelligible or audible but the next moment Victor sprang erect.  Dartrey
+quitted the box.  Nesta beheld her father uttering hurried words to right
+and left.  He passed from sight, Mr. Peridon with him; and Dartrey did
+not return.
+
+Nesta felt her father's absence as light gone: his eyes rayed light.
+Besides she had the anticipation of a speech from him, that would win
+Matilda Pridden.  She fancied Simeon Fenellan to be rather under the
+spell of the hilarity he roused.  A gentleman behind him spoke in his
+ear; and Simeon, instead of ceasing, resumed his flow.  Matilda Pridden's
+gaze on him and the people was painful to behold: Nesta saw her mind.
+She set herself to study a popular assembly.  It could be serious to the
+call of better leadership, she believed.  Her father had been telling her
+of late of a faith he had in the English, that they (or so her
+intelligence translated his remarks) had power to rise to spiritual
+ascendancy, and be once more the Islanders heading the world of a new
+epoch abjuring materialism--some such idea; very quickening to her, as it
+would be to this earnest young woman worshipped by Skepsey.  Her father's
+absence and the continued shouts of laughter, the insatiable thirst for
+fun, darkened her in her desire to have the soul of the good working
+sister refreshed.  They had talked together; not much: enough for each to
+see at either's breast the wells from the founts of life.
+
+The box-door opened, Dartrey came in.  He took her hand.  She stood-up to
+his look.  He said to Matilda Pridden: 'Come with us; she will need you.'
+
+'Speak it,' said Nesta.
+
+He said to the other: 'She has courage.'
+
+'I could trust to her,' Matilda Pridden replied.
+
+Nesta read his eyes.  'Mother?'
+
+His answer was in the pressure.
+
+'Ill?'
+
+'No longer.'
+
+'Oh!  Dartrey.'  Matilda Pridden caught her fast.
+
+'I can walk, dear,' Nesta said.
+
+Dartrey mentioned her father.
+
+She understood: 'I am thinking of him.'
+
+The words of her mother: 'At peace when the night is over,' rang.  Along
+the gassy passages of the back of tie theatre, the sound coming from an
+applausive audience was as much a thunder as rage would have been.  It
+was as void of human meaning as a sea.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLII
+
+THE LAST
+
+In the still dark hour of that April morning, the Rev. Septimus Barmby
+was roused by Mr. Peridon, with a scribbled message from Victor, which he
+deciphered by candlelight held close to the sheet of paper, between short
+inquiries and communications, losing more and more the sense of it as his
+intelligence became aware of what dread blow had befallen the stricken
+man.  He was bidden come to fulfil his promise instantly.  He remembered
+the bearing of the promise.  Mr. Peridon's hurried explanatory narrative
+made the request terrific, out of tragically lamentable.  A semblance of
+obedience had to be put on, and the act of dressing aided it.  Mr. Barmby
+prayed at heart for guidance further.
+
+The two gentlemen drove Westward, speaking little; they had the dry sob
+in the throat.
+
+'Miss Radnor?'  Mr. Barmby asked.
+
+'She is shattered; she holds up; she would not break down.'
+
+'I can conceive her to possess high courage.'
+
+'She has her friend Mademoiselle de Seilles.'
+
+Mr. Barmby remained humbly silent.  Affectionate deep regrets moved him
+to say: 'A loss irreparable.  We have but one voice of sorrow.  And how
+sudden!  The dear lady had no suffering, I trust.'
+
+'She fell into the arms of Mr. Durance.  She died in his arms.  She was
+unconscious, he says.  I left her straining for breath.  She said
+"Victor"; she tried to smile:--I understood I was not to alarm him.'
+
+'And he too late!'
+
+'He was too late, by some minutes.'
+
+'At least I may comfort.  Miss Radnor must be a blessing to him.'
+
+'They cannot meet.  Her presence excites him.'
+
+That radiant home of all hospitality seemed opening on from darker
+chambers to the deadly dark.  The immorality in the moral situation could
+not be forgotten by one who was professionally a moralist.  But an
+incorruptible beauty in the woman's character claimed to plead for her
+memory.  Even the rigorous in defence of righteous laws are softened by a
+sinner's death to hear excuses, and may own a relationship, haply
+perceive the faint nimbus of the saint.  Death among us proves us to be
+still not so far from the Nature saying at every avenue to the mind:
+'Earth makes all sweet.'
+
+Mr. Durance had prophesied a wailful end ever to the carol of Optimists!
+Yet it is not the black view which is the right view.  There is one
+between: the path adopted by Septimus Barmby:--if he could but induce his
+brethren to enter on it!  The dreadful teaching of circumstances might
+help to the persuading of a fair young woman, under his direction .  .  .
+having her hand disengaged.  Mr. Barmby started himself in the dream of
+his uninterred passion for the maiden: he chased it, seized it, hurled it
+hence, as a present sacrilege:--constantly, and at the pitch of our
+highest devotion to serve, are we assailed by the tempter!  Is it, that
+the love of woman is our weakness?  For if so, then would a celibate
+clergy have grant of immunity.  But, alas, it is not so with them!  We
+have to deplore the hearing of reports too credible.  Again we are pushed
+to contemplate woman as the mysterious obstruction to the perfect purity
+of soul.  Nor is there a refuge in asceticism.  No more devilish
+nourisher of pride do we find than in pain voluntarily embraced.  And
+strangely, at the time when our hearts are pledged to thoughts upon
+others, they are led by woman to glance revolving upon ourself, our vile
+self!  Mr. Barmby clutched it by the neck.
+
+Light now, as of a strong memory of day along the street, assisted him to
+forget himself at the sight of the inanimate houses of this London, all
+revealed in a quietness not less immobile than tombstones of an unending
+cemetery, with its last ghost laid.  Did men but know it!--The habitual
+necessity to amass matter for the weekly sermon, set him noting his
+meditative exclamations, the noble army of platitudes under haloes, of
+good use to men: justifiably turned over in his mind for their good.  He
+had to think, that this act of the justifying of the act reproached him
+with a lack of due emotion, in sympathy with agonized friends truly dear.
+Drawing near the hospitable house, his official and a cordial emotion
+united, as we see sorrowful crape-wreathed countenances.  His heart
+struck heavily when the house was visible.
+
+Could it be the very house?  The look of it belied the tale inside.  But
+that threw a ghostliness on the look.
+
+Some one was pacing up and down.  They greeted Dudley Sowerby.  His
+ability to speak was tasked.  They gathered, that mademoiselle and 'a
+Miss Pridden' were sitting with Nesta, and that their services in a
+crisis had been precious.  At such times, one of them reflected, woman
+has indeed her place: when life's battle waxes red.  Her soul must be
+capable of mounting to the level of the man's, then?  It is a lesson!
+
+Dudley said he was waiting for Dr. Themison to come forth.  He could not
+tear himself from sight of the house.
+
+The door opened to Dr. Themison departing, Colney Durance and Simeon
+Fenellan bare-headed.  Colney showed a face with stains of the lashing of
+tears.
+
+Dr. Themison gave his final counsels.  'Her father must not see her.  For
+him, it may have to be a specialist.  We will hope the best.  Mr. Dartrey
+Fenellan stays beside him:--good.  As to the ceremony he calls for, a
+form of it might soothe:--any soothing possible!  No music.  I will
+return in a few hours.'
+
+He went on foot.
+
+Mr. Barmby begged advice from Colney and Simeon concerning the message he
+had received--the ceremony requiring his official presidency.  Neither of
+them replied.  They breathed the morning air, they gave out long-drawn
+sighs of relief, looking on the trees of the park.
+
+A man came along the pavement, working slow legs hurriedly.  Simeon ran
+down to him.
+
+'Humour, as much as you can,' Colney said to Mr. Barmby.  'Let him
+imagine.'
+
+'Miss Radnor?'
+
+'Not to speak of her.'
+
+'The daughter he so loves?'
+
+Mr. Barmby's tender inquisitiveness was unanswered.  Were they inducing
+him to mollify a madman?  But was it possible to associate the idea of
+madness with Mr. Radnor?
+
+Simeon ran back.  'Jarniman,' he remarked.  'It's over!'
+
+'Now!' Colney's shoulders expressed the comment.  'Well, now, Mr. Barmby,
+you can do the part desired.  Come in.  It's morning!' He stared at the
+sky.
+
+All except Dudley passed in.
+
+Mr. Barmby wanted more advice, his dilemma being acute.  It was
+moderated, though not more than moderated, when he was informed of the
+death of Mrs. Burman Radnor; an event that occurred, according to
+Jarniman's report, forty-five minutes after Skepsey had a second time
+called for information of it at the house in Regent's Park--five hours
+and a half, as Colney made his calculation, after the death of Nataly.
+He was urged by some spur of senseless irony to verify the calculation
+and correct it in the minutes.
+
+Dudley crossed the road.  No sign of the awful interior was on any of the
+windows of the house either to deepen awe or relieve.  They were blank as
+eyeballs of the mindless.  He shivered.  Death is our common cloak; but
+Calamity individualizes, to set the unwounded speculating whether indeed
+a stricken man, who has become the cause of woeful trouble, may not be
+pointing a moral.  Pacing on the Park side of the house, he saw Skepsey
+drive up and leap out with a gentleman, Mr. Radnor's lawyer.  Could it
+be, that there was no Will written?  Could a Will be executed now?  The
+moral was more forcibly suggested.  Dudley beheld this Mr. Victor Radnor
+successful up all the main steps, persuasive, popular, brightest of the
+elect of Fortune, felled to the ground within an hour, he and all his
+house!  And if at once to pass beneath the ground, the blow would have
+seemed merciful for him.  Or if, instead of chattering a mixture of the
+rational and the monstrous, he had been heard to rave like the utterly
+distraught.  Recollection of some of the things he shouted, was an
+anguish: A notion came into the poor man, that he was the dead one of the
+two, and he cried out: 'Cremation?  No, Colney's right, it robs us of our
+last laugh.  I lie as I fall.'  He 'had a confession for his Nataly, for
+her only, for no one else.'  He had 'an Idea.'  His begging of Dudley to
+listen without any punctilio (putting a vulgar oath before it), was the
+sole piece of unreasonableness in the explanation of the idea: and that
+was not much wilder than the stuff Dudley had read from reports of
+Radical speeches.  He told Dudley he thought him too young to be 'best
+man to a widower about to be married,' and that Barmby was 'coming all
+haste to do the business, because of no time to spare.'
+
+Dudley knew but the half, and he did not envy Dartrey Fenellan his task
+of watching over the wreck of a splendid intelligence, humouring and
+restraining.  According to the rumours, Mr. Radnor had not shown the
+symptoms before the appearance of his daughter.  For awhile he hung, and
+then fell, like an icicle.  Nesta came with a cry for her father.  He
+rose: Dartrey was by.  Hugged fast in iron muscles, the unhappy creature
+raved of his being a caged lion.  These things Dudley had heard in the
+house.
+
+There are scenes of life proper to the grave-cloth.
+
+Nataly's dead body was her advocate with her family, with friends, with
+the world.  Victor had more need of a covering shroud to keep calamity
+respected.  Earth makes all sweet: and we, when the privilege is granted
+us, do well to treat the terribly stricken as if they had entered to the
+bosom of earth.
+
+That night's infinite sadness was concentrated upon Nesta.  She had need
+of her strength of mind and body.
+
+The night went past as a year.  The year followed it as a refreshing
+night.  Slowly lifting her from our abysses, it was a good angel to the
+girl.  Permission could not be given for her to see her father.  She had
+a home in the modest home of Louise de Seilles on the borders of
+Dauphins; and with French hearts at their best in winningness around her,
+she learned again, as an art, the natural act of breathing calmly; she
+had by degrees a longing for the snow-heights.  When her imagination
+could perch on them with love and pride, she began to recover the throb
+for a part in human action.  It set her nature flowing to the mate she
+had chosen, who was her counsellor, her supporter, and her sword.  She
+had awakened to new life, not to sink back upon a breast of love, though
+thoughts of the lover were as blows upon strung musical chords of her
+bosom.  Her union with Dartrey was for the having an ally and the being
+an ally, in resolute vision of strife ahead, through the veiled dreams
+that bear the blush.  This was behind a maidenly demureness.  Are not
+young women hypocrites?  Who shall fathom their guile!  A girl with a
+pretty smile, a gentle manner, a liking for wild flowers up on the rocks;
+and graceful with resemblances to the swelling proportions of garden-
+fruits approved in young women by the connoisseur eye of man; distinctly
+designed to embrace the state of marriage, that she might (a girl of
+singularly lucid and receptive eyes) the better give battle to men
+touching matters which they howl at an eccentric matron for naming.
+So it was.  And the yielding of her hand to Dartrey, would have appeared
+at that period of her revival, as among the baser compliances of the
+fleshly, if she had not seen in him, whom she owned for leader, her
+fellow soldier, warrior friend, hero, of her own heart's mould, but a
+greater.
+
+She was on Como, at the villa of the Signora Giulia Sanfredini, when
+Dudley's letter reached her, with the supplicating offer of the share of
+his earldom.  An English home meanwhile was proposed to her at the house
+of his mother the Countess.  He knew that he did not write to a brilliant
+heiress.  The generosity she had always felt that he possessed, he thus
+proved in figures.  They are convincing and not melting.  But she was
+moved to tears by his goodness in visiting her father, as well as by the
+hopeful news he sent.  He wrote delicately, withholding the title of her
+father's place of abode.  There were expectations of her father's perfect
+recovery; the signs were auspicious; he appeared to be restored to the
+'likeness to himself' in the instances Dudley furnished:--his appointment
+with him for the flute-duet next day; and particularly his enthusiastic
+satisfaction with the largeness and easy excellent service of the
+residence 'in which he so happily found himself established.'  He held it
+to be, 'on the whole, superior to Lakelands.'  The smile and the tear
+rolled together in Nesta reading these words.  And her father spoke
+repeatedly of longing to embrace his Fredi, of the joy her last letter
+had given him, of his intention to send an immediate answer: and he
+showed Dudley a pile of manuscript ready for the post.  He talked of
+public affairs, was humorous over any extravagance or eccentricity in the
+views he took; notably when he alluded to his envy of little Skepsey.  He
+said he really did envy; and his daughter believed it and saw fair
+prospects in it.
+
+Her grateful reply to the young earl conveyed all that was perforce
+ungentle, in the signature of the name of Nesta Victoria Fenellan:--
+a name he was to hear cited among the cushioned conservatives, and plead
+for as he best could under a pressure of disapprobation, and compelled
+esteem, and regrets.
+
+The day following the report of her father's wish to see her, she and her
+husband started for England.  On that day, Victor breathed his last.
+Dudley had seen the not hopeful but an ominous illumination of the
+stricken man; for whom came the peace his Nataly had in earth.  Often did
+Nesta conjure up to vision the palpitating form of the beloved mother
+with her hand at her mortal wound in secret through long years of the
+wearing of the mask to keep her mate inspirited.  Her gathered knowledge
+of things and her ruthless penetrativeness made it sometimes hard for her
+to be tolerant of a world, whose tolerance of the infinitely evil stamped
+blotches on its face and shrieked in stains across the skin beneath its
+gallant garb.  That was only when she thought of it as the world
+condemning her mother.  She had a husband able and ready, in return for
+corrections of his demon temper, to trim an ardent young woman's
+fanatical overflow of the sisterly sentiments; scholarly friends, too,
+for such restrainings from excess as the mind obtains in a lamp of
+History exhibiting man's original sprouts to growth and fitful
+continuation of them.  Her first experience of the grief that is in
+pleasure, for those who have passed a season, was when the old Concert-
+set assembled round her.  When she heard from the mouth of a living
+woman, that she had saved her from going under the world's waggon-wheels,
+and taught her to know what is actually meant by the good living of a
+shapely life, Nesta had the taste of a harvest happiness richer than her
+recollection of the bride's, though never was bride in fuller flower to
+her lord than she who brought the dower of an equal valiancy to Dartrey
+Fenellan.  You are aware of the reasons, the many, why a courageous young
+woman requires of high heaven, far more than the commendably timid, a
+doughty husband.  She had him; otherwise would that puzzled old world,
+which beheld her step out of the ranks to challenge it, and could not
+blast her personal reputation, have commissioned a paw to maul her
+character, perhaps instructing the gossips to murmur of her parentage.
+Nesta Victoria Fenellan had the husband who would have the world
+respectful to any brave woman.  This one was his wife.
+
+Daniel Skepsey rejoices in service to his new master, owing to the
+scientific opinion he can at any moment of the day apply for, as to the
+military defences of the country; instead of our attempting to arrest the
+enemy by vociferations of persistent prayer:--the sole point of
+difference between him and his Matilda; and it might have been fatal but
+that Nesta's intervention was persuasive.  The two members of the Army
+first in the field to enrol and give rank according to the merits of
+either, to both sexes, were made one.  Colney Durance (practically
+cynical when not fancifully, men said) stood by Skepsey at the altar.
+His published exercises in Satire produce a flush of the article in the
+Reviews of his books.  Meat and wine in turn fence the Hymen beckoning
+Priscilla and Mr. Pempton.  The forms of Religion more than the Channel's
+division of races keep Louise de Seilles and Mr. Peridon asunder: and in
+the uniting of them Colney is interested, because it would have so
+pleased the woman of the loyal heart no longer beating.  He let Victor's
+end be his expiation and did not phrase blame of him.  He considered the
+shallowness of the abstract Optimist exposed enough in Victor's history.
+He was reconciled to it when, looking on their child, he discerned, that
+for a cancelling of the errors chargeable to them, the father and mother
+had kept faith with Nature.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+An incomprehensible world indeed at the bottom and at the top
+Arrest the enemy by vociferations of persistent prayer
+Country prizing ornaments higher than qualities
+Death is our common cloak; but Calamity individualizes
+How little we mean to do harm when we do an injury
+Nation's half made-up of the idle and the servants of the idle
+No companionship save with the wound they nurse
+Not always the right thing to do the right thing
+The night went past as a year
+Universal censor's angry spite
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of One Our Conquerors, v5
+by George Meredith
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS, ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS, COMPLETE:
+
+Admiration of an enemy or oppressor doing great deeds
+All of us an ermined owl within us to sit in judgement
+An incomprehensible world indeed at the bottom and at the top
+Aristocratic assumption of licence
+Arrest the enemy by vociferations of persistent prayer
+Ask not why, where reason never was
+Belief in the narrative by promoting nausea in the audience
+But what is it we do (excepting cricket, of course)
+Cannot be any goodness unless it is a practiced goodness
+Claim for equality puts an end to the priceless privileges
+Consent of circumstances
+Consent to take life as it is
+Continued trust in the man--is the alternative of despair
+Country prizing ornaments higher than qualities
+Cover of action as an escape from perplexity
+Critical fashion of intimates who know as well as hear
+Death is our common cloak; but Calamity individualizes
+Despises hostile elements and goes unpunished
+Dialogue between  Nature and Circumstance
+Dithyrambic inebriety of narration
+Dudley was not gifted to read behind words and looks
+Eminently servile is the tolerated lawbreaker
+Exuberant anticipatory trustfulness
+Fell to chatting upon the nothings agreeably and seriously
+Feminine; coming when she willed and flying when wanted
+Fire smoothes the creases
+Frankness as an armour over wariness
+Greater our successes, the greater the slaves we become
+Half designingly permitted her trouble to be seen
+Half a dozen dozen left
+Happy the woman who has not more to speak
+Hard to bear, at times unbearable
+Haremed opinion of the unfitness of women
+He sinks terribly when he sinks at all
+He never acknowledged a trouble, he dispersed it
+He never explained
+He neared her, wooing her; and she assented
+He prattled, in the happy ignorance of compulsion
+Heathen vindictiveness declaring itself holy
+Honest creatures who will not accept a lift from fiction
+How little we mean to do harm when we do an injury
+How Success derides Ambition!
+If only been intellectually a little flexible in his morality
+If we are robbed, we ask, How came we by the goods?
+If we are really for Nature, we are not lawless
+In the pay of our doctors
+In bottle if not on draught (oratory)
+Intrusion of hard material statements, facts
+Judgeing of the destiny of man by the fate of individuals
+Kelts, as they are called, can't and won't forgive injuries
+Let but the throb be kept for others--That is the one secret
+Love must needs be an egoism
+Man with a material object in aim, is the man of his object
+Memory inspired by the sensations
+Nation's half made-up of the idle and the servants of the idle
+Naturally as deceived as he wished to be
+Nature and Law never agreed
+Nature could at a push be eloquent to defend the guilty
+Nature's logic, Nature's voice, for self-defence
+Next door to the Last Trump
+No companionship save with the wound they nurse
+Not to go hunting and fawning for alliances
+Not always the right thing to do the right thing
+Obeseness is the most sensitive of our ailments
+Official wrath at sound of footfall or a fancied one
+Once out of the rutted line, you are food for lion and jackal
+One wants a little animation in a husband
+Optional marriages, broken or renewed every seven years
+People of a provocative prosperity
+Pessimy is invulnerable
+Portrait of himself by the artist
+Put into her woman's harness of the bit and the blinkers
+Repeatedly, in contempt of the disgust of iteration
+Satirist is an executioner by profession
+Satirist too devotedly loves his lash to be a persuasive teacher
+Self-deceiver may be a persuasive deceiver of another
+Semblance of a tombstone lady beside her lord
+Share of foulness to them that are for scouring the chamber
+She was not his match--To speak would be to succumb
+She disdained to question the mouth which had bitten her
+Slap and pinch and starve our appetites
+Slave of existing conventions
+Smallest of our gratifications in life could give a happy tone
+Smothered in its pudding-bed of the grotesque (obesity)
+Snuffle of hypocrisy in her prayer
+Startled by the criticism in laughter
+State of feverish patriotism
+Statistics are according to their conjurors
+Subterranean recess for Nature against the Institutions of Man
+Tale, which leaves the man's mind at home
+The banquet to be fervently remembered, should smoke
+The homage we pay him flatters us
+The effects of the infinitely little
+The night went past as a year
+The old confession, that we cannot cook(The English)
+The worst of it is, that we remember
+The face of a stopped watch
+The impalpable which has prevailing weight
+There is little to be learnt when a little is known
+They helped her to feel at home with herself
+They kissed coldly, pressed a hand, said good night
+They do not live; they are engines
+Thought of differences with him caused frightful apprehensions
+To do nothing, is the wisdom of those who have seen fools perish
+Universal censor's angry spite
+Unshamed exuberant male has found the sweet reverse in his mate
+We have come to think we have a claim upon her gratitude
+We must have some excuse, if we would keep to life
+We cannot relinquish an idea that was ours
+We've all a parlous lot too much pulpit in us
+Whimpering fits you said we enjoy and must have in books
+Who enjoyed simple things when commanding the luxuries
+
+
+[The End]
+
+
+
+
+*************************************************************************
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+End of the Project Gutenberg etext of One of Our Conquerors, Complete
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