Nataly had a fit of weeping for want of the girl’s embrace, against whom her door was jealously locked.  She hoped those two would talk much, madly if they liked, during dinner, that she might not be sensible, through any short silence, of the ardour animating them:  especially glowing in Nesta, ready behind her quiet mask to come brazenly forth.  But both of them were mercilessly ardent; and a sickness of the fear, that they might fall on her to capture her and hurry her along with them perforce of the allayed, once fatal, inflammable element in herself, shook the warmth from her limbs:  causing her to say to herself aloud in a ragged hoarseness, very strangely:  Every thought of mine now has a physical effect on me!

They had not been two minutes together when she descended to them.  Yet she saw the girl’s heart brimming, either with some word spoken to her or for joy of an unmaidenly confession.  During dinner they talked, without distressful pauses.  Whatever said, whatever done, was manifestly another drop in Nesta’s foolish happy cup.  Could it be all because Dartrey Fenellan countenanced her acquaintance with that woman?  The mother had lost hold of her.  The tortured mother had lost hold of herself.

Dartrey in the course of the evening, begged to hear the contralto; and Nataly, refusing, was astounded by the admission in her blank mind of the truth of man’s list of charges against her sex, starting from their capriciousness for she could have sung in a crowded room, and she had now a desire for company, for stolid company or giddy, an ocean of it.  This led to her thinking, that the world of serious money-getters, and feasts, and the dance, the luxurious displays, and the reverential Sunday service, will always ultimately prove itself right in opposition to critics and rebels, and to any one vainly trying to stand alone:  and the thought annihilated her; for she was past the age of the beginning again, and no footing was left for an outsider not self-justified in being where she stood.  She heard Dartrey’s praise of Nesta’s voice for tearing her mother’s bosom with notes of intolerable sweetness; and it was haphazard irony, no doubt; we do not the less bleed for the accident of a shot.

At last, after midnight Victor arrived.

Nesta most impudently expected to be allowed to remain.  ’Pray, go, dear,’ her mother said.  Victor kissed his Fredi.  ‘Some time to-morrow,’ said he; and she forbore to beseech him.

He stared, though mildly, at sight of her taking Dartrey’s hand for the good-night and deliberately putting her lips to it.

Was she a girl whose notion of rectifying one wrong thing done, was to do another?  Nataly could merely observe.  A voice pertaining to no one present, said in her ear:—­Mothers have publicly slapped their daughter’s faces for less than that!—­It was the voice of her incapacity to cope with the girl.  She watched Nesta’s passage from the room, somewhat affected by the simple bearing for which she was reproaching her.