A suggestion of her mother’s coming down, was
faintly spoken by one lady, echoed in a quaver by
the other.
Nesta shook her head. To quiet the kind souls,
she entreated them to give their promise that they
would invite her again.
Imagining the Hon. Dudley to have cast her off, both
ladies embraced her: not entirely yielding-up
their hearts to her, by reason of the pernicious new
ideas now in the world to sap our foundations of morality;
which warned them of their duty to uphold mentally
his quite justifiable behaviour, even when compassionating
the sufferings of the guiltless creature loved by
them.
CONTAINS DEEDS UNRELATED AND EXPOSITIONS OF FEELINGS
All through the afternoon and evening Skepsey showed
indifference to meals by continuing absent: and
he was the one with whom Nesta would have felt at
home; more at home than with her parents. He
and the cool world he moved in were a transparency
of peace to her mind; even to his giving of some portion
of it, when she had the dear little man present to
her in a vivid image of a fish in a glass globe, wandering
round and round, now and then shooting across, just
as her Skepsey did: he carried his head semihorizontally
at his arrowy pace; plain to read though he was, he
appeared, under that image created of him, animated
by motives inducing to speculation.
She thought of him till she could have reproached
him for not returning and helping her to get away
from the fever of other thoughts:—this
anguish twisting about her parents, and the dreadful
trammels of gratitude to a man afflictingly generous,
the frown of congregated people.
The latter was the least of evils; she had her charges
to bring against them for injustice: uncited,
unstirred charges, they were effective as a muffled
force to sustain her: and the young who are of
healthy lively blood and clean conscience have either
emotion or imagination to fold them defensively from
an enemy world; whose power to drive them forth into
the wilderness they acknowledge. But in the wilderness
their souls are not beaten down by breath of mortals;
they burn straight flame there up to the parent Spirit.
She could not fancy herself flying thither;—where
to be shorn and naked and shivering is no hardship,
for the solitude clothes, and the sole true life in
us resolves to that steady flame;—she was
restrained by Dudley’s generosity, which held
her fast to have the forgiveness for her uncommitted
sin dashed in her face. He surprised her; the
unexpected quality in him seemed suddenly to have
snared her fast: and she did not obtain release
after seeing behind it;—seeing it, by the
light of what she demanded, personal, shallow, a lover’s
generosity. So her keen intellect saw it; and
her young blood (for the youthful are thus divided)
thrilled in thinking it must be love! The name
of the sacred passion lifted it out of the petty cabin
