much of Nature their abstract honourable conception or representative eidolon of young women will bear without going to pieces; and it will not be much, unless they shall have taken instruction from the poet’s pen:  for a view possibly of Nature at work to cast the slough, when they see her writhing as in her ugliest old throes.  If they have learnt of Nature’s priest to respect her, they will less distrust those rare daughters of hers who are moved by her warmth to lift her out of slime.  It is by her own live warmth that it has to be done:  cold worship at a niche in the wall will not do it.—­Well, there is an index, for the enlargement of your charity.

But facts were Dudley’s teachers.  Physically, morally, mentally, he read the world through facts; that is to say, through the facts he encountered:  and he was in consequence foredoomed to a succession of bumps; all the heavier from his being, unlike the horned kind, not unimpressible by the hazy things outside his experience.  Even at his darkest over Nesta, it was his indigestion of the misconduct of her parents, which denied to a certain still small advocate within him the right to raise a voice:  that good fellow struck the attitude for pleading, and had to be silent; for he was Instinct; at best a stammering speaker in the Court of the wigged Facts.  Instinct of this Nesta Radnor’s character would have said a brave word, but for her deeds bearing witness to her inheritance of a lawlessly adventurous temperament.

What to do?  He was no nearer to an answer when the wintry dusk had fallen on the promenading crowds.  To do nothing, is the wisdom of those who have seen fools perish.  Facts had not taught him, that the doing nothing, for a length of days after the first shock he sustained, was the reason of how it came that Nesta knitted closer her acquaintance with the ‘agreeable lady’ she mentioned in her letter to Cronidge.  Those excellent counsellors of a mercantile community gave him no warnings, that the ‘masterly inactive’ part, so greatly esteemed by him for the conduct of public affairs, might be perilous in dealings with a vivid girl:  nor a hint, that when facts continue undigested, it is because the sensations are as violent as hysterical females to block them from the understanding.  His Robin Goodfellow instinct tried to be serviceable at a crux of his meditations, where Edith Averst’s consumptive brothers waved faded hands at her chances of inheriting largely.  Superb for the chances:  but what of her offspring?  And the other was a girl such as the lusty Dame Dowager of fighting ancestors would have signalled to the heir of the House’s honours for the perpetuation of his race.  No doubt:  and the venerable Dame (beautiful in her old-lace frame, or say foliage) of the Ages backward, temp:  Ed:  III. inflated him with a thought of her:  and his readings in modern books on heredity, pure blood, physical regeneration, pronounced approval of Nesta Radnor:  and thereupon instinct opened mouth to speak; and a lockjaw seized it under that scowl of his presiding mistrust of Nature.