e 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 reve