However, a keen young reporter present smelt fun for copy; he followed the couple; and in a particular evening Journal, laughable matter was printed concerning Skepsey’s view of the pugilism to be imparted to women for their physical-protection in extremity, and the distinction of it from the blow conveying the moral lesson to them; his wife having objected to the former, because it annoyed her and he pestered her; and she was never, she said, ready to stand up to him for practice, as he called it, except when she had taken more than he thought wholesome for her:  he had no sense.  There was a squabble between them, because he chose to scour away to his master’s office instead of conducting her home with the honours.  Nesta read the young reporter’s version, with shrieks.  She led the ladies of Moorsedge to discover amusement in it.

At first, as her letter to her mother described them, they were like a pair of pieces of costly China, with the settled smile, and cold.  She saw but the outside of them, and she continued reporting the variations, which steadily determined the warmth.  On the night of the third day, they kissed her tenderly; they were human figures.

No one could be aware of the trial undergone by the good ladies in receiving her:  Victor’s child; but, as their phrase would have run, had they dared to give it utterance to one another, a child of sin.  How foreign to them, in that character, how strange, when she was looked on as an inhabitant of their house, they hardly dared to estimate; until the timorous estimation, from gradually swelling, suddenly sank; nature invaded them; they could discard the alienating sense of the taint; and not only did they no longer fear the moment when Mr. Stuart Rem or Mr. Posterley might call for evening tea, but they consulted upon inviting the married one of those gentlemen, to ‘divert dear Nesta.’  Every night she slept well.  In all she did, she proved she was ‘of the blood.’  She had Victor’s animated eyes; she might have, they dreaded to think, his eloquence.  They put it down to his eloquence entirely, that their resistance to his petition had been overcome, for similarly with the treatment of the private acts of royal personages by lacquey History, there is, in the minds of the ultra-civilized, an insistance, that any event having a consequence in matters personal to them, be at all hazards recorded with the utmost nicety in decency.  By such means, they preserve the ceremonial self-respect, which is a necessity of their existence; and so they maintain the regal elevation over the awe-struck subjects of their interiors; who might otherwise revolt, pull down, scatter, dishonour, expose for a shallow fiction the holiest, the most vital to them.  A democratic evil spirit is abroad, generated among congregations, often perilously communicating its wanton laughter to the desperate wickedness they know (not solely through the monition of Mr. Stuart Rem) to lurk within.  It has to be excluded:  on certain points they must not think.  The night of Tasso was darkly clouded in the minds of the pure ladies:  a rift would have seized their half-slumbering sense of smell, to revive the night, perhaps disorder the stately march of their intelligences.