urs 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 b