She had the sympathy, nevertheless, and renewing and increasing with the pulsations of a compassion that she took for her reflective survey.  The next time she saw Dartrey Fenellan, she was assured of him, as being the man who might be spoken to; and by a woman:  though not by a girl; not spoken to by her.  The throb of the impulse precipitating speech subsided to a dumb yearning.  He noticed her look:  he was unaware of the human sun in the girl’s eyes taking an image of him for permanent habitation in her breast.  That face of his, so clearly lined, quick, firm, with the blue smile on it like the gleam of a sword coming out of sheath, did not mean hardness, she could have vowed.  O that some woman, other than the unhappy woman herself, would speak the words denied to a girl!  He was the man who would hearken and help.  Essential immediate help was to be given besides the noble benevolence of mind.  Novel ideas of manliness and the world’s need for it were printed on her understanding.  For what could women do in aid of a good cause!  She fawned:  she deemed herself very despicably her hero’s inferior.  The thought of him enclosed her.  In a prison, the gaoler is a demi-God-hued bright or black, as it may be; and, by the present arrangement between the sexes, she, whom the world allowed not to have an intimation from eye or ear, or from nature’s blood-ripeness in commune with them, of certain matters, which it suffers to be notorious, necessarily directed her appeal almost in worship to the man, who was the one man endowed to relieve, and who locked her mouth for shame.

Thus was she, too, being put into her woman’s harness of the bit and the blinkers, and taught to know herself for the weak thing, the gentle parasite, which the fiction of our civilization expects her, caressingly and contemptuously, to become in the active, while it is exacted of hero Comedy of Clowns!—­that in the passive she be a rockfortress impregnable, not to speak of magically encircled.  She must also have her feelings; she must not be an unnatural creature.  And she must have a sufficient intelligence; for her stupidity does not flatter the possessing man.  It is not an organic growth that he desires in his mate, but a happy composition.  You see the world which comes of the pair.

This burning Nesta, Victor’s daughter, tempered by Nataly’s milder blood, was a girl in whom the hard shocks of the knowledge of life, perforce of the hardness upon pure metal, left a strengthening for generous imagination.  She did not sit to brood on her injured senses or set them through speculation touching heat; they were taken up and consumed by the fire of her mind.  Nor had she leisure for the abhorrences, in a heart all flowing to give aid, and uplift and restore.  Self was as urgent in her as in most of the young; but the gift of humour, which had previously diverted it, was now the quick feeling for her sisterhood, through the one piteous example