’Odd, her mother has turned dead round in favour of that fellow Dudley Sowerby!  I don’t complain; it suits; but one thinks—­eh?—­women!’

’Well, yes, one thinks or should think, that if you insist on having women rooted to the bed of the river, they’ll veer with the tides, like water-weeds, and no wonder.’

’Your heterodoxy on that subject is a mania, Dartrey.  We can’t have women independent.’

‘Then don’t be exclaiming about their vagaries.’

Victor mused:  ’It’s wonderful:  that little girl of mine!—­good height now:  but what a head she has!  Oh, she’ll listen to reason:  only mark what I say:—­with that quiet air of hers, the husband, if a young fellow, will imagine she’s the most docile of wives in the world.  And as to wife, I’m not of the contrary opinion.  But qua individual female, supposing her to have laid fast hold of an idea of duty, it’s he who’ll have to turn the corner second, if they’re to trot in the yoke together.  Or it may be an idea of service to a friend—­or to her sex!  That Mrs. Marsett says she feels for—­“bleeds” for her sex.  The poor woman didn’t show to advantage with me, because she was in a fever to please:—­talks in jerks, hot phrases.  She holds herself well.  At the end of the dinner she behaved better.  Odd, you can teach women with hints and a lead.  But Marsett ’s Marsett to the end.  Rather touching!—­the poor fellow said:  Deuce of a bad look-out for me if Judith doesn’t have a child!  First-rate sportsman, I hear.  He should have thought of his family earlier.  You know, Dartrey, the case is to be argued for the family as well.  You won’t listen.  And for Society too!  Off you go.’

A battery was opened on that wall of composite.

‘Ah, well,’ said Victor.  ’But I may have to beg your help, as to the so-called promise to stand at the altar.  I don’t mention it upstairs.’

He went to Nataly’s room.

She was considerately treated, and was aware of being dandled, that she might have sleep.

She consented to it, in a loathing of the topic.—­Those women invade us —­we cannot keep them out! was her inward cry:  with a reverberation of the unfailing accompaniment:  The world holds you for one of them!

Victor tasked her too much when his perpetual readiness to doat upon his girl for whatever she did, set him exalting Nesta’s conduct.  She thought:  Was Nesta so sympathetic with her mother of late by reason of a moral insensibility to the offence?

This was her torture through the night of a labouring heart, that travelled to one dull shock, again and again repeated:—­the apprehended sound, in fact, of Dudley Sowerby’s knock at the street door.  Or sometimes a footman handed her his letter, courteously phrased to withdraw from the alliance.  Or else he came to a scene with Nesta, and her mother was dragged into it, and the intolerable subject steamed about her.  The girl was visioned as deadly.