Far from expungeing the doubt of her, forgiveness gave it a stamp and an edge.  His renewed enslavement set him perusing his tyrant keenly, as nauseated captives do; and he saw, that forgiveness was beside the case.  For this Nesta Victoria Radnor would not crave it or accept it.  He had mentally played the woman to her superior vivaciousness too long for him to see her taking a culprit’s attitude.  What she did, she intended to do.  The mother would not have encouraged her.  The father idolized her; and the father was a frank hedonist, whose blood . . . speculation on horseback gallops to barren extremes.  Eyes like hers—­if there had not been the miserable dupes of girls!  Conduct is the sole guide to female character.  That likewise may be the hypocrite’s mask.

Popular artists, intent to gratify the national taste for effects called realistic, have figured in scenes of battle the raying fragments of a man from impact of a cannon-ball on his person.  Truly thus it may be when flesh contends.  But an image of the stricken and scattered mind of the man should, though deficient in the attraction, have a greater significance, forasmuch as it does not exhibit him entirely liquefied and showered into space; it leaves him his legs for the taking of further steps.  Dudley, standing on the platform of Nesta’s train, one half minute too late, according to his desire before he put himself in motion, was as wildly torn as the vapour shredded streaming to fingers and threads off the upright columnar shot of the shriek from the boiler.  He wished every mad antagonism to his wishes:  that he might see her, be blind to her; embrace, discard; heal his wound, and tear it wider.  He thanked her for the grossness of an offence precluding excuses.  He was aware of a glimmer of advocacy in the very grossness.  He conjured-up her features, and they said, her innocence was the sinner; they scoffed at him for the dupe he was willing to be.  She had enigma’s mouth, with the eyes of morning.

More than most girls, she was the girl-Sphinx to him because of her having ideas—­or what he deemed ideas.  She struck a toneing warmth through his intelligence, not dissimilar to the livelier circulation of the blood in the frame breathing mountain air.  She really helped him, incited him to go along with this windy wild modern time more cheerfully, if not quite hopefully.  For she had been the book of Romance he despised when it appeared as a printed volume:  and which might have educated the young man to read some among our riddles in the book of humanity.  The white he was ready to take for silver the black were all black; the spotted had received corruption’s label.  Her youthful French governess Mademoiselle de Seilles was also peculiarly enigmatic at the mouth conversant, one might expect, with the disintegrating literature of her country.  In public, the two talked of St. Louis.  One of them in secret visits a Mrs. Marsett.  The Southweare women, the Hennen women, and Lady Evelina Reddish, were artless candid creatures in their early days, not transgressing in a glance.  Lady Grace Halley had her fit of the devotional previous to marriage.  No girl known to Dudley by report or acquaintance had committed so scandalous an indiscretion as Miss Radnor’s:  it pertained to the insolently vile.