advantage
with me, because she was in a fever to please:--talks in jerks, hot
phrases. She holds herself well. At the end of the dinner she behaved
better. Odd, you can teach women with hints and a lead. But Marsett 's
Marsett to the end. Rather touching!--the poor fellow said: Deuce of a
bad look-out for me if Judith doesn't have a child! First-rate sportsman,
I hear. He should have thought of his family earlier. You know, Dartrey,
the case is to be argued for the family as well. You won't listen. And
for Society too! Off you go.'

A battery was opened on that wall of composite.

'Ah, well,' said Victor. 'But I may have to beg your help, as to the
so-called promise to stand at the altar. I don't mention it upstairs.'

He went to Nataly's room.

She was considerately treated, and was aware of being dandled, that she
might have sleep.

She consented to it, in a loathing of the topic.--Those women invade
us--we cannot keep them out! was her inward cry: with a reverberation of
the unfailing accompaniment: The world holds you for one of them!

Victor tasked her too much when his perpetual readiness to doat upon his
girl for whatever she did, set him exalting Nesta's conduct. She thought:
Was Nesta so sympathetic with her mother of late by reason of a moral
insensibility to the offence?

This was her torture through the night of a labouring heart, that
travelled to one dull shock, again and again repeated:--the apprehended
sound, in fact, of Dudley Sowerby's knock at the street door. Or
sometimes a footman handed her his letter, courteously phrased to
withdraw from the alliance. Or else he came to a scene with Nesta, and
her mother was dragged into it, and the intolerable subject steamed about
her. The girl was visioned as deadly. She might be indifferent to the
protection of Dudley's name. Robust, sanguine, Victor's child, she
might--her mother listened to a devil's whisper--but no; Nesta's aim was
at the heights; she was pure in mind as in body. No, but the world would
bring the accusation; and the world would trace the cause: Heredity, it
would say. Would it say falsely? Nataly harped on the interrogation until
she felt her existence dissolving to a dark stain of the earth, and she
found herself wondering at the breath she drew, doubting that another
would follow, speculating on the cruel force which keeps us to the act of
breathing.--Though I could draw wild blissful breath if I were galloping
across the moors!