Her handwriting was good, as good as the writing of the most agreeable lady on earth.  Dudley did not blame her for letting the lady be deceived in her—­if she knew her position.  She might be ignorant of it.  And to strangers, to chance acquaintances, even to friends, the position, of the loathsome name, was not materially important.  Marriage altered the view.  He sided with his family.

He sided, edgeing away, against his family.  But a vision of the earldom coming to him, stirred reverential objections, composed of all which his unstained family could protest in religion, to repudiate an alliance with a stained house, and the guilty of a condonation of immorality.  Who would have imagined Mr. Radnor a private sinner flaunting for one of the righteous?  And she, the mother, a lady—­quite a lady; having really a sense of duty, sense of honour!  That she must be a lady, Dudley was convinced.  He beheld through a porous crape, woven of formal respectfulness, with threads of personal disgust, the scene, striking him drearly like a distant great mansion’s conflagration across moorland at midnight, of a lady’s breach of bonds and plunge of all for love.  How had it been concealed?  In Dudley’s upper sphere, everything was exposed:  Scandal walked naked and unashamed-figurante of the polite world.  But still this lady was of the mint and coin, a true lady.  Handsome now, she must have been beautiful.  And a comprehensible pride (for so would Dudley have borne it) keeps the forsaken man silent up to death:  . . . grandly silent; but the loss of such a woman is enough to kill a man!  Not in time, though!  Legitimacy evidently, by the mother’s confession, cannot protect where it is wanted.  Dudley was optically affected by a round spot of the world swinging its shadow over Nesta.

He pitied, and strove to be sensible of her.  The effort succeeded so well, that he was presently striving to be insensible.  The former state, was the mounting of a wall; the latter, was a sinking through a chasm.  There would be family consultations, abhorrent; his father’s agonized amazement at the problem presented to a family of scrupulous principles and pecuniary requirements; his mother’s blunt mention of the abominable name—­mediaevally vindicated in champions of certain princely families indeed, but morally condemned; always under condemnation of the Church:  a blot:  and handed down:  Posterity, and it might be a titled posterity, crying out.  A man in the situation of Dudley could not think solely of himself.  The nobles of the land are bound in honour to their posterity.  There you have one of the prominent permanent distinctions between them and the commonalty.

His mother would again propose her chosen bride for him:  Edith Averst, with the dowry of a present one thousand pounds per annum, and prospect of six or so, excluding Sir John’s estate, Carping, in Leicestershire; a fair estate, likely to fall to Edith; consumption seized her brothers as they ripened.  A fair girl too; only Dudley did not love her; he wanted to love.  He was learning the trick from this other one, who had become obscured and diminished, tainted, to the thought of her; yet not extinct.  Sight of her was to be dreaded.