auty of the swallow's flight?'

There was, for a girl, a bit of idea, real idea, in that meaning, of
course, the picture we are to have of the bird's wings in motion, it has
often been admired. Oh! not much of an idea in itself: feminine and
vague. But it was pertinent, opportune; in this way she stimulated. And
the girl who could think it, and call on a Mrs. Marsett, was of the class
of mixtures properly to be handed over to chemical experts for analysis!

She had her aspirations on behalf of her sex: she and Mademoiselle de
Seilles discussed them; women were to do this, do that:--necessarily a
means of instructing a girl to learn what they did do. If the lower part
of her face had been as reassuring to him as the upper, he might have put
a reluctant faith in the pure-mindedness of these aspirations, without
reverting to her origin, and also to recent rumours of her father and
Lady Grace Halley. As it was, he inquired of the cognizant, whether an
intellectual precocity, devoted by preference to questions affecting the
state of women, did not rather more than suggest the existence of urgent
senses likewise. She, a girl under twenty, had an interest in public
matters, and she called on a Mrs. Marsett. To plead her simplicity, was
to be absolutely ignorant of her.

He neighboured sagacity when he pointed that interrogation relating to
Nesta's precociousness of the intelligence. For, as they say in
dactylomancy, the 'psychical' of women are not disposed in their
sensitive early days to dwell upon the fortunes of their sex: a thought
or two turns them facing away, with the repugnant shiver. They worship at
a niche in the wall. They cannot avoid imputing some share of foulness to
them that are for scouring the chamber; and the civilized male, keeping
his own chamber locked, quite shares their pale taper's view. The
full-blooded to the finger-tips, on the other hand, are likely to be
drawn to the subject, by noble inducement as often as by base: Nature at
flood being the cause in either instance. This young Nature of the good
and the bad, is the blood which runs to power of heart as well as to
thirsts of the flesh. Then have men to sound themselves, to discover how
much of Nature their abstract honourable conception or representative
eidolon of young women will bear without going to pieces; and it will not
be much, unless they shall have taken instruction from the poet's pen:
for a view possibly of Nature at work to cast the