Nesta found it pleasanter to see him than to hear of his work:  which, to her present feeling, was inhuman.  As little as our native public, had she then any sympathy for the working in the idea:  she wanted throbs, visible aims, the Christian incarnate; she would have preferred the tale of slaughter—­periodically invading all English classes as a flush from the undrained lower, Vikings all—­to frigid sterile Satire.  And truly it is not a fruit-bearing rod.  Colney had to stand on the defence of it against the damsel’s charges.  He thought the use of the rod, while expressing profound regret at a difference of opinion between him and those noble heathens, beneficial for boys; but in relation to their seniors, and particularly for old gentlemen, he thought that the sharpest rod to cut the skin was the sole saving of them.  Insensibility to Satire, he likened to the hard-mouthed horse; which is doomed to the worser thing in consequence.  And consequently upon the lack of it, and of training to appreciate it, he described his country’s male venerables as being distinguishable from annuitant spinsters only in presenting themselves forked.

’He is unsuccessful and embittered, Victor said to Nesta.  ’Colney will find in the end, that he has lost his game and soured himself by never making concessions.  Here’s this absurd Serial—­it fails, of course; and then he has to say, it’s because he won’t tickle his English, won’t enter into a “frowzy complicity” with their tastes.’

’But—­I think of Skepsey honest creatures respect Mr. Durance, and he is always ready to help them,’ said Nesta.

‘If he can patronize.’

‘Does he patronize me, dada?’

’You are one of his exceptions.  Marry a title and live in state—­and then hear him!  I am successful, and the result of it is, that he won’t acknowledge wisdom in anything I say or do; he will hardly acknowledge the success.  It is “a dirty road to success,” he says.  So that, if successful, I must have rolled myself in mire.  I compelled him to admit he was wrong about your being received at Moorsedge:  a bit of a triumph!’

Nesta’s walks with her father were no loss of her to Nataly; the girl came back to her bearing so fresh and so full a heart; and her father was ever prouder of her:  he presented new features of her in his quotations of her sayings, thoughtful sayings.  ‘I declare she helps one to think,’ he said.  ’It ’s not precocity; it ’s healthy inquiry.  She brings me nearer ideas of my own, not yet examined, than any one else does.  I say, what a wife for a man!’

‘She takes my place beside you, dear, now I am not quite strong,’ said Nataly.  ‘You have not seen . . .?’

’Dudley Sowerby?  He’s at Cronidge, I believe.  His elder brother’s in a bad way.  Bad business, this looking to a death.’

Nataly eyes revealed a similar gulf.