er brought Nesta in person to her.

CHAPTER XXX

THE BURDEN UPON NESTA

Could there be confidences on the subject of Mrs. Marsett with Captain
Dartrey?--Nesta timidly questioned her heart: she knocked at an iron door
shut upon a thing alive. The very asking froze her, almost to stopping
her throbs of pity for the woman. With Captain Dartrey, if with any one;
but with no one. Not with her mother even. Toward her mother, she felt
guilty of knowing. Her mother had a horror of that curtain. Nesta had
seen it, and had taken her impressions; she, too, shrank from it; the
more when impelled to draw near it. Louise de Seilles would have been
another self; Louise was away; when to return, the dear friend could not
state. Speaking in her ear, would have been possible; the theme precluded
writing.

It was ponderous combustible new knowledge of life for a girl to hold
unaided. In the presence of the simple silvery ladies Dorothea and
Virginia, she had qualms, as if she were breaking out in spots before
them. The ladies fancied, that Mr. Stuart Rem had hinted to them oddly of
the girl; and that he might have meant, she appeared a little too
cognizant of poor Mr. Abram Posterley's malady--as girls in these
terrible days, only too frequently, too brazenly, are. They discoursed to
her of the degeneracy of the manners, nay, the morals of young
Englishwomen, once patterns! They sketched the young English gentlewoman
of their time; indeed a beauty; with round red cheeks, and rounded open
eyes, and a demure shut mouth, a puppet's divine ignorance; inoffensive
in the highest degree, rightly worshipped. They were earnest, and Nesta
struck at herself. She wished to be as they had been, reserving her
painful independence.

They were good: they were the ideal women of our country; which demands
if it be but the semblance of the sureness of stationary excellence; such
as we have in Sevres and Dresden, polished bright and smooth as
ever by the morning's flick of a duster; perhaps in danger of
accidents--accidents must be kept away; but enviable, admirable, we
think, when we are not thinking of seed sown or help given to the
generations to follow. Nesta both envied and admired; she revered them;
yet her sharp intelligence, larger in the extended boundary of thought
coming of strange crimson-lighted new knowledge, discerned in a dimness
what blest conditions had fixed them on their beautiful barren eminence.
Without challengeing it, she