cy
in that direction, which does not consent to the revealing of much. Here
was the mother's dilemma: her girl--Victor's girl, as she had to think
in this instance,--the most cloudless of the young women of earth,
seemed, and might be figured as really, at the falling of a crumb off
the table of knowledge, taken by the brain to shoot up to terrific
heights of surveyal; and there she rocked; and only her youthful
healthiness brought her down to grass and flowers. She had once or twice
received the electrical stimulus, to feel and be as lightning, from a
seizure of facts in infinitesimal doses, guesses caught off maternal
evasions or the circuitous explanation of matters touching sex in here
and there a newspaper, harder to repress completely than sewer-gas in
great cities: and her mother had seen, with an apprehensive pang of
anguish, how witheringly the scared young intelligence of the innocent
creature shocked her sensibility. She foresaw the need to such a
flameful soul, as bride, wife, woman across the world, of the very
princeliest of men in gifts of strength, for her sustainer and guide.
And the provident mother knew this peerless gentleman: but he had his
wife.

Delusions and the pain of the disillusioning were to be feared for the
imaginative Nesta; though not so much as that on some future day of a
perchance miserable yokemating--a subjection or an entanglement--the
nobler passions might be summoned to rise for freedom, and strike a line
to make their logically estimable sequence from a source not honourable
before the public. Constantly it had to be thought, that the girl was
her father's child.

At present she had no passions; and her bent to the happiness she could
so richly give, had drawn her sailing smoothly over the harbour-bar of
maidenhood; where many of her sisters are disconcerted to the loss of
simplicity. If Nataly with her sleepless watchfulness and forecasts
partook of the French mother, Nesta's Arcadian independence likened her
somewhat in manner to the Transatlantic version of the English girl. Her
high physical animation and the burden of themes it plucked for delivery
carried her flowing over impediments of virginal self-consciousness, to
set her at her ease in the talk with men; she had not gone through the
various Nursery exercises in dissimulation; she had no appearance of
praying forgiveness of men for the original sin of being woman; and no
tricks of lips or lids, or traitor scarlet on