‘They frighten you.’

‘They make me shut; that is all.’

’Supposing you were some day to discover . . . ta-tata, all the things there are in the world.’  Mrs. Marsett let fly an artificial chirrup.  ’You must have some ideas of me.’

‘I think you have had unhappy experiences.’

’Nesta . . . just now and then! the first time we rode out together, coming back from the downs, I remember, I spoke, without thinking—­I was enraged—­of a case in the newspapers; and you had seen it, and you were not afraid to talk of it.  I remember I thought, Well, for a girl, she’s bold!  I thought you knew more than a girl ought to know:  until—­you did—­you set my heart going.  You spoke of the poor women like an angel of compassion.  You said, we were all mixed up with their fate—­I forget the words.  But no one ever heard in Church anything that touched me so.  I worshipped you.  You said, you thought of them often, and longed to find out what you could do to help.  And I thought, if they could hear you, and only come near you, as I was—­ah, my heaven!  Unhappy experiences?  Yes.  But when men get women on the slope to their perdition, they have no mercy, none.  They deceive, and they lie; they are false in acts and words; they do as much as murder.  They’re never hanged for it.  They make the Laws!  And then they become fathers of families, and point the finger at the “wretched creatures.”  They have a dozen names against women, for one at themselves.’

‘It maddens me at times to think . . . !’ said Nesta, burning with the sting of vile names.

Oh, there are bad women as well as bad men:  but men have the power and the lead, and they take advantage of it; and then they turn round and execrate us for not having what they have robbed us of!’

‘I blame women—­if I may dare, at my age,’ said Nesta, and her bosom heaved.  ’Women should feel for their sex; they should not allow the names; they should go among their unhappier sisters.  At the worst, they are sisters!  I am sure, that fallen cannot mean—­Christ shows it does not.  He changes the tone of Scripture.  The women who are made outcasts, must be hopeless and go to utter ruin.  We should, if we pretend to be better, step between them and that.  There cannot be any goodness unless it is a practiced goodness.  Otherwise it is nothing more than paint on canvas.  You speak to me of my innocence.  What is it worth, if it is only a picture and does no work to help to rescue?  I fear I think most of the dreadful names that redden and sicken us.—­The Old Testament!—­I have a French friend, a Mademoiselle Louise de Seines—­you should hear her:  she is intensely French, and a Roman Catholic, everything which we are not:  but so human, so wise, and so full of the pride of her sex!  I love her.  It is love.  She will never marry until she meets a man who has the respect for women, for all women.  We both think we cannot separate ourselves from our sisters.  She seems to me to wither men, when she speaks of their injustice, their snares to mislead and their cruelty when they have succeeded.  She is right, it is the—­brute:  there is no other word.’