way with young women.  ’With young women educated for the market, to be timorous, consequently secretive, rather snaky,’ Colney Durance had said.  Her Nesta was not one of the ‘framed and glazed’ description, cited by him, for an example of the triumph of the product; ’exactly harmonious with the ninny male’s ideal of female innocence.’  No; but what if the mother had opened her heart to her girl?  It had been of late her wish or a dream, shaping hourly to a design, now positively to go through that furnace.  Her knowledge of Victor’s objection, restrained an impulse that had not won spring enough to act against his counsel or vivify an intelligence grown dull in slavery under him, with regard to the one seeming right course.  The adoption of it would have wounded him—­ therefore her.  She had thought of him first; she had also thought of herself, and she blamed herself now.  She went so far as to think, that Victor was guilty of the schemer’s error of counting human creatures arithmetically, in the sum, without the estimate of distinctive qualities and value here and there.  His return to a shivering sensitiveness on the subject of his girl’s enlightenment ‘just yet,’ for which Nataly pitied and loved him, sharing it, with humiliation for doing so, became finally her excuse.  We must have some excuse, if we would keep to life.

Skepsey’s case appeared in the evening papers.  He confessed, ‘frankly,’ he said, to the magistrate, that, ’acting under temporary exasperation, he had lost for a moment a man’s proper self-command.’  He was as frank in stating, that he ’occupied the prisoner’s place before his Worship a second time, and was a second time indebted to the gentleman, Mr. Colney Durance, who so kindly stood by him.’  There was hilarity in the Court at his quaint sententious envelopment of the idiom of the streets, which he delivered with solemnity:  ’He could only plead, not in absolute justification—­an appeal to human sentiments—­the feelings of a man of the humbler orders, returning home in the evening, and his thoughts upon things not without their importance, to find repeatedly the guardian of his household beastly drunk, and destructive.’  Colney made the case quite intelligible to the magistrate; who gravely robed a strain of the idiomatic in the officially awful, to keep in tune with his delinquent.  No serious harm had been done to the woman.  Skepsey was admonished and released.  His wife expressed her willingness to forgive him, now he had got his lesson; and she hoped he would understand, that there was no need for a woman to learn pugilism.  Skepsey would have explained; but the case was over, he was hustled out.