There had been a dream of it; with the life-awakening marvel it would be, the humbleness it would bring to her soul beneath the golden clothing of her body:  one of those faint formless dreams, which are as the bend of grasses to the breath of a still twilight.  She lived too spiritedly to hang on any dream; and had moreover a muffled dread-shadow-sister to the virginal desire—­of this one, as of a fateful power that might drag her down, disorder, discolour.  But now she had heard it:  the word, the very word itself! in her own ears! addressed to her! in a man’s voice!  The first utterance had been heard, and it was over; the chapter of the book of bulky promise of the splendours and mysteries;—­the shimmering woods and bushy glades, and the descent of the shape celestial, and the recognition—­the mutual cry of affinity; and overhead the crimson outrolling of the flag of beneficent enterprises hand in hand, all was at an end.  These, then, are the deceptions our elders tell of!  That masculine voice should herald a new world to the maiden.  The voice she had heard did but rock to ruin the world she had been living in.

Mademoiselle prudently forbore from satirical remarks on his person or on his conduct.  Nesta had nothing to defend:  she walked in a bald waste.

‘Can I have been guilty of leading him to think . . .?’ she said, in a tone that writhed, at a second discussion of this hapless affair.

‘They choose to think,’ mademoiselle replied.  ’It is he or another.  My dear and dearest, you have entered the field where shots fly thick, as they do to soldiers in battle; and it is neither your fault nor any one’s, if you are hit.’

Nesta gazed at her, with a shy supplicating cry of ‘Louise.’

Mademoiselle immediately answered the tone of entreaty.  ’Has it happened to me?  I am of the age of eight and twenty; passable, to look at:  yes, my dear, I have gone through it.  To spare you the questions tormenting you, I will tell you, that perhaps our experience of our feelings comes nigh on a kind of resemblance.  The first gentleman who did me the honour to inform me of his passion, was a hunchback.’

Nesta cried ‘Oh!’ in a veritable pang of sympathy, and clapped hands to her ears, to shut out Mr. Barmby’s boom of the terrific word attacking Louise from that deformed one.

Her disillusionment became of the sort which hears derision.  A girl of quick blood and active though unregulated intellect, she caught at the comic of young women’s hopes and experiences, in her fear of it.

’My own precious poor dear Louise! what injustice there is in the world for one like my Louise to have a hunchback to be the first . . . !’

‘But, my dear, it did me no harm.’

‘But if it had been known!’

‘But it was known!’