The letter brought Nesta in person to her.

CHAPTER XXX

THE BURDEN UPON NESTA

Could there be confidences on the subject of Mrs. Marsett with Captain Dartrey?—­Nesta timidly questioned her heart:  she knocked at an iron door shut upon a thing alive.  The very asking froze her, almost to stopping her throbs of pity for the woman.  With Captain Dartrey, if with any one; but with no one.  Not with her mother even.  Toward her mother, she felt guilty of knowing.  Her mother had a horror of that curtain.  Nesta had seen it, and had taken her impressions; she, too, shrank from it; the more when impelled to draw near it.  Louise de Seilles would have been another self; Louise was away; when to return, the dear friend could not state.  Speaking in her ear, would have been possible; the theme precluded writing.

It was ponderous combustible new knowledge of life for a girl to hold unaided.  In the presence of the simple silvery ladies Dorothea and Virginia, she had qualms, as if she were breaking out in spots before them.  The ladies fancied, that Mr. Stuart Rem had hinted to them oddly of the girl; and that he might have meant, she appeared a little too cognizant of poor Mr. Abram Posterley’s malady—­as girls in these terrible days, only too frequently, too brazenly, are.  They discoursed to her of the degeneracy of the manners, nay, the morals of young Englishwomen, once patterns!  They sketched the young English gentlewoman of their time; indeed a beauty; with round red cheeks, and rounded open eyes, and a demure shut mouth, a puppet’s divine ignorance; inoffensive in the highest degree, rightly worshipped.  They were earnest, and Nesta struck at herself.  She wished to be as they had been, reserving her painful independence.

They were good:  they were the ideal women of our country; which demands if it be but the semblance of the sureness of stationary excellence; such as we have in Sevres and Dresden, polished bright and smooth as ever by the morning’s flick of a duster; perhaps in danger of accidents—­accidents must be kept away; but enviable, admirable, we think, when we are not thinking of seed sown or help given to the generations to follow.  Nesta both envied and admired; she revered them; yet her sharp intelligence, larger in the extended boundary of thought coming of strange crimson-lighted new knowledge, discerned in a dimness what blest conditions had fixed them on their beautiful barren eminence.  Without challengeing it, she had a rebellious rush of sympathy for our evil-fortuned of the world; the creatures in the battle, the wounded, trodden, mud-stained:  and it alarmed her lest she should be at heart one out of the fold.