Unguiltily tainted, in herself she was innocent.  That constituted the unhappy invitation to him to swallow one half of his feelings, which had his world’s blessing on it, for the beneficial enlargement and enthronement of the baser unblest half, which he hugged and distrusted.  Can innocence issue of the guilty?  He asked it, hopeing it might be possible:  he had been educated in his family to believe, that the laws governing human institutions are divine—­until History has altered them.  They are altered, to present a fresh bulwark against the infidel.  His conservative mind, retiring in good order, occupied the next rearward post of resistance.  Secretly behind it, the man was proud of having a heart to beat for the cause of the besiegeing enemy, in the present instance.  When this was blabbed to him, and he had owned it, he attributed his weakness to excess of nature, the liking for a fair face.  —­Oh, but more! spirit was in the sweet eyes.  She led him—­she did lead him in spiritual things; led him out of common circles of thought, into refreshing new spheres; he had reminiscences of his having relished the juices of the not quite obviously comic, through her indications:  and really, in spite of her inferior flimsy girl’s education, she could boast her acquirements; she was quick, startlingly; modest, too, in commerce with a slower mind that carried more; though she laughed and was a needle for humour:  she taught him at times to put away his contempt of the romantic; she had actually shown him, that his expressed contempt of it disguised a dread:  as it did, and he was conscious of the foolishness of it now while pursuing her image, while his intelligence and senses gave her the form and glory of young morning.

Wariness counselled him to think it might be merely the play of her youth; and also the disposition of a man in harness of business, exaggeratingly to prize an imagined finding of the complementary feminine of himself.  Venerating purity as he did, the question, whether the very sweetest of pure young women, having such an origin, must not at some time or other show trace of the origin, surged up.  If he could only have been sure of her moral exemption from taint, a generous ardour, in reserve behind his anxious dubieties, would have precipitated Dudley to quench disapprobation and brave the world under a buckler of those monetary advantages, which he had but stoutly to plead with the House of Cantor, for the speedy overcoming of a reluctance to receive the nameless girl and prodigious heiress.  His family’s instruction of him, and his inherited tastes, rendered the aspect of a Nature stripped of the clothing of the laws offensive down to devilish:  we grant her certain steps, upon certain conditions accompanied by ceremonies; and when she violates them, she becomes visibly again the revolutionary wicked old beast bent on levelling our sacredest edifices.  An alliance with any of her votaries, appeared to Dudley as an act of treason to his house, his class, and his tenets.  And nevertheless he was haunted by a cry of criminal happiness for and at the commission of the act.