But the walk Westward with his girl, together with pride in a daughter who clove her way through all weathers, won his heart to exultation.  He told her:  ‘Fredi does her dada so much good’; not telling her in what, or opening any passage to the mystery of the man he was.  She was trying to be a student of life, with her eyes down upon hard earth, despite of her winged young head; she would have compassed him better had he dilated in sublime fashion; but he baffled her perusal of a man of power by the simpleness of his enjoyment of small things coming in his way;—­the lighted shops, the crowd, emergence from the crowd, or the meeting near midwinter of a soft warm wind along the Embankment, and dark Thames magnificently coroneted over his grimy flow.  There is no grasping of one who quickens us.

His flattery of his girl, too, restored her broken feeling of personal value; it permeated her nourishingly from the natural breath of him that it was.

At times he touched deep in humaneness; and he set her heart leaping on the flash of a thought to lay it bare, with the secret it held, for his help.  That was a dream.  She could more easily have uttered the words to Captain Dartrey, after her remembered abashing holy tremour of the vision of doing it and casting herself on noblest man’s compassionateness; and her imagined thousand emotions;—­a rolling music within her, a wreath of cloudglory in her sky;—­which had, as with virgins it may be, plighted her body to him for sheer urgency of soul; drawn her by a single unwitting-to-brain, conscious-in-blood, shy curl outward of the sheathing leaf to the flowering of woman to him; even to the shore of that strange sea, where the maid stands choosing this one man for her destiny, as in a trance.  So are these young ones unfolded, shade by shade; and a shade is all the difference with them; they can teach the poet to marvel at the immensity of vitality in ‘the shadow of a shade.’

Her father shut the glimpse of a possible speaking to him of Mrs. Marsett, with a renewal of his eulogistic allusions to Dudley Sowerby:  the ‘perfect gentleman, good citizen’; prospective heir to an earldom besides.  She bowed to Dudley’s merits; she read off the honorific pedimental letters of a handsome statue, for a sign to herself that she passed it.

She was unjust, as Victor could feel, though he did not know how coldly unjust.  For among the exorbitant requisitions upon their fellow-creatures made by the young, is the demand, that they be definite:  no mercy is in them for the transitional.  And Dudley—­and it was under her influence, and painfully, not ignobly—­was in process of development:  interesting to philosophers, if not to maidens.