Nor had she leisure for the
abhorrences, in a heart all flowing to give aid, and uplift and restore.
Self was as urgent in her as in most of the young; but the gift of
humour, which had previously diverted it, was now the quick feeling for
her sisterhood, through the one piteous example she knew; and broadening
it, through her insurgent abasement on their behalf, which was her
scourged pride of sex. She but faintly thought of blaming the men whom
her soul besought for justice, for common kindness, to women. There was
the danger, that her aroused young ignorance would charge the whole of
the misery about and abroad upon the stronger of those two: and another
danger, that the vision of the facts below the surface would discolour
and disorder her views of existence. But she loved, she sprang to, the
lighted world; and she had figures of male friends, to which to cling;
and they helped in animating glorious historical figures on the world's
library-shelves or under yet palpitating earth. Promise of a steady
balance of her nature, too, was shown in the absence of any irritable
urgency to be doing, when her bosom bled to help. Beyond the resolve,
that she would not abandon the woman who had made confession to her, she
formed no conscious resolutions. Far ahead down her journey of the years
to come, she did see muffled things she might hope and would strive to
do. They were chrysalis shapes. Above all, she flew her blind quickened
heart on the wings of an imaginative force; and those of the young
who can do that, are in their blood incorruptible by dark knowledge,
irradiated under darkness in the mind. Let but the throb be kept for
others. That is the one secret, for redemption; if not for preservation.

Victor descended on his marine London to embrace his girl, full of
regrets at Fredi's absence from the great whirl 'overhead,' as places of
multitudinous assembly, where he shone, always appeared to him. But it
was not to last long; she would soon be on the surface again! At the
first clasp of her, he chirped some bars of her song. He challenged her
to duet before the good ladies, and she kindled, she was caught up
by his gaiety, wondering at herself; faintly aware of her not being
spontaneous. And she made her father laugh, just in the old way; and
looked at herself in his laughter, with the thought, that she could
not have become so changed; by which the girl was helped to jump to her
humour. Victor turned his full front to