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 majest