Nesta said:  ‘Mr. Sowerby promised he would come.’

‘However it may be,’ Dorothea repeated her curtaining phrase.

Virginia put in a word of apology for Tasso’s temper he enjoyed ordinarily a slumber of half an hour’s longer duration.  He was, Dorothea feelingly added, regularity itself.  Virginia murmured:  ‘Except once!’ and both were appalled by the recollection of that night.  It had, nevertheless, caused them to reperuse the Rev. Stuart Rem’s published beautiful sermon on dirt; the words of which were an antidote to the night of Tasso in the nostrils of Mnemosyne; so that Dorothea could reply to her sister, slightly by way of a reproval, quoting Mr. Stuart Rem at his loftiest:  ’"Let us not bring into the sacred precincts Dirt from the roads, but have a care to spread it where it is a fructification."’ Virginia produced the sequent sentence, likewise weighty.  Nesta stood between the thin division of their beds, her right hand given to one, her left to the other.  They had the semblance of a haven out of storms.

She reflected, after shutting the door of their room, that the residing with them had been a means of casting her—­it was an effort to remember how—­upon the world where the tree of knowledge grows.  She had eaten; and she might be the worse for it; but she was raised to a height that would not let her look with envy upon peace and comfort.  Luxurious quiet people were as ripening glass-house fruits.  Her bitter gathering of the knowledge of life had sharpened her intellect; and the intellect, even in the young, is, and not less usefully, hard metal rather than fallow soil.  But for the fountain of human warmth at her breast, she might have been snared by the conceit of intellect, to despise the simple and conventional, or shed the pity which is charity’s contempt.  She had only to think of the kindness of the dear good ladies; her heart jumped to them at once.  And when she fancied hearing those innocent souls of women embracing her and reproaching her for the knowledge of life she now bore, her words down deep in her bosom were:  It has helped me to bear the shock of other knowledge!  How would she have borne it before she knew of the infinitely evil?  Saving for the tender compassion weeping over her mother, she had not much acute personal grief.

For this world condemning her birth, was the world tolerant of that infinitely evil!  Her intellect fortified her to be combative by day, after the night of imagination; which splendid power is not so serviceable as the logical mind in painful seasons:  for night revealed the world snorting Dragon’s breath at a girl guilty of knowing its vilest.  More than she liked to recall, it had driven her scorched, half withered, to the shelter of Dudley.  The daylight, spreading thin at the windows, restored her from that weakness.  ‘We will quit England,’ she said, thinking of her mother and herself, and then of her father’s surely following them.  She sighed thankfully, half way through the breakfast with Skepsey, at sight of the hour by the clock; she was hurriedly sentient of the puzzle of her feelings, when she guessed at a chance that Dudley would be delayed.  She supposed herself as possibly feeling not so well able to keep every thought of her head brooding on her mother in Dudley’s company.