y 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