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 nerving. And with her thought of him, her tooth was at
her underlip, she struggled abashed, in hesitation over men's views of
her sex, and how to bring a frank mind to meet him; to be sure of his
not at heart despising; until his character swam defined and bright
across her scope. 'He is good to women.' Fragments of conversation,
principally her father's, had pictured Captain Dartrey to her most
ma