Striking for a reason, her inexperience of our modern England, supplemented by readings in the England of a preceding generation, had hit on her father’s profession of merchant.  It accounted to her for the behaviour of the haughty territorial and titled families.  But certain of the minor titles headed City Firms, she had heard; certain of the families were avowedly commercial.  ‘They follow suit,’ her father said at Creckholt, after he had found her mother weeping, and decided instantly to quit and fly once more.  But if they followed suit in such a way, then Mr. Durance must be right when he called the social English the most sheepy of sheep:—­and Nesta could not consent to the cruel verdict, she adored her compatriots.  Incongruities were pacified for her by the suggestion of her quick wits, that her father, besides being a merchant, was a successful speculator; and perhaps the speculator is not liked by merchants; or they were jealous of him; or they did not like his being both.

She pardoned them with some tenderness, on a suspicion that a quaint old high-frilled bleached and puckered Puritanical rectitude (her thoughts rose in pictures) possibly condemned the speculator as a description of gambler.  An erratic severity in ethics is easily overlooked by the enthusiast for things old English.  She was consciously ahead of them in the knowledge that her father had been, without the taint of gambling, a beneficent speculator.  The Montgomery colony in South Africa, and his dealings with the natives in India, and his Railways in South America, his establishment of Insurance Offices, which were Savings Banks, and the Stores for the dispensing of sound goods to the poor, attested it.  O and he was hospitable, the kindest, helpfullest of friends, the dearest, the very brightest of parents:  he was his girl’s playmate.  She could be critic of him, for an induction to the loving of him more justly:  yet if he had an excessive desire to win the esteem of people, as these keen young optics perceived in him, he strove to deserve it; and no one could accuse him of laying stress on the benefits he conferred.  Designedly, frigidly to wound a man so benevolent, appeared to her as an incomprehensible baseness.  The dropping of acquaintanceship with him, after the taste of its privileges, she ascribed, in the void of any better elucidation, to a mania of aristocratic conceit.  It drove her, despite her youthful contempt of politics, into a Radicalism that could find food in the epigrams of Mr. Colney Durance, even when they passed her understanding; or when he was not too distinctly seen by her to be shooting at all the parties of her beloved England, beneath the wicked semblance of shielding each by turns.