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 nervi