Ay, and in the presence of Colney Durance, Victor would not have been so encouraging, half boyishly caressing, with Dudley Sowerby!  It was the very manner to sow seed of imitativeness in the girl, devoted as she was to her father.  Nataly sighed, foreseeing evil, owning it a superstition, feeling it a certainty.  We are easily prophets, sure of being justified, when the cleverness of schemes devoted to material ends appears most delicately perfect.  History, the tales of households, the tombstone, are with us to inspire.  In Nataly’s bosom, the reproof of her inefficiency for offering counsel where Victor for his soul’s sake needed it, was beginning to thunder at whiles as a reproach of unfittingness in his mate, worse than a public denunciation of the sin against Society.

It might be decreed that she and Society were to come to reconcilement.  A pain previously thought of, never previously so realized, seized her at her next sight of Nesta.  She had not taken in her front mind the contrast of the innocent one condemned to endure the shadow from which the guilty was by a transient ceremony released.  Nature could at a push be eloquent to defend the guilty.  Not a word of vindicating eloquence rose up to clear the innocent.  Nothing that she could do; no devotedness, not any sacrifice, and no treaty of peace, no possible joy to come, nothing could remove the shadow from her child.  She dreamed of the succour in eloquence, to charm the ears of chosen juries while a fact spoke over the population, with a relentless rolling out of its one hard word.  But eloquence, powerful on her behalf, was dumb when referred to Nesta.  It seemed a cruel mystery.  How was it permitted by the Merciful Disposer! . . .  Nataly’s intellect and her reverence clashed.  They clash to the end of time if we persist in regarding the Spirit of Life as a remote Externe, who plays the human figures, to bring about this or that issue, instead of being beside us, within us, our breath, if we will; marking on us where at each step we sink to the animal, mount to the divine, we and ours who follow, offspring of body or mind.  She was in her error, from judgeing of the destiny of man by the fate of individuals.  Chiefly her error was, to try to be thinking at all amid the fevered tangle of her sensations.

A darkness fell upon the troubled woman, and was thicker overhead when her warm blood had drawn her to some acceptance of the philosophy of existence, in a savour of gratification at the prospect of her equal footing with the world while yet she lived.  She hated herself for taking pleasure in anything to be bestowed by a world so hap-hazard, ill-balanced, unjust; she took it bitterly, with such naturalness as not to be aware that it was irony and a poisonous irony moving her to welcome the restorative ceremony because her largeness of person had a greater than common need of the protection.

CHAPTER XVII