together.  Or it may be an idea of service to a friend—­or to her sex!  That Mrs. Marsett says she feels for—­“bleeds” for her sex.  The poor woman didn’t show to advantage with me, because she was in a fever to please:—­talks in jerks, hot phrases.  She holds herself well.  At the end of the dinner she behaved better.  Odd, you can teach women with hints and a lead.  But Marsett ’s Marsett to the end.  Rather touching!—­the poor fellow said:  Deuce of a bad look-out for me if Judith doesn’t have a child!  First-rate sportsman, I hear.  He should have thought of his family earlier.  You know, Dartrey, the case is to be argued for the family as well.  You won’t listen.  And for Society too!  Off you go.’

A battery was opened on that wall of composite.

‘Ah, well,’ said Victor.  ’But I may have to beg your help, as to the so-called promise to stand at the altar.  I don’t mention it upstairs.’

He went to Nataly’s room.

She was considerately treated, and was aware of being dandled, that she might have sleep.

She consented to it, in a loathing of the topic.—­Those women invade us—­we cannot keep them out! was her inward cry:  with a reverberation of the unfailing accompaniment:  The world holds you for one of them!

Victor tasked her too much when his perpetual readiness to doat upon his girl for whatever she did, set him exalting Nesta’s conduct.  She thought:  Was Nesta so sympathetic with her mother of late by reason of a moral insensibility to the offence?

This was her torture through the night of a labouring heart, that travelled to one dull shock, again and again repeated:—­the apprehended sound, in fact, of Dudley Sowerby’s knock at the street door.  Or sometimes a footman handed her his letter, courteously phrased to withdraw from the alliance.  Or else he came to a scene with Nesta, and her mother was dragged into it, and the intolerable subject steamed about her.  The girl was visioned as deadly.  She might be indifferent to the protection of Dudley’s name.  Robust, sanguine, Victor’s child, she might—­her mother listened to a devil’s whisper—­but no; Nesta’s aim was at the heights; she was pure in mind as in body.  No, but the world would bring the accusation; and the world would trace the cause:  Heredity, it would say.  Would it say falsely?  Nataly harped on the interrogation until she felt her existence dissolving to a dark stain of the earth, and she found herself wondering at the breath she drew, doubting that another would follow, speculating on the cruel force which keeps us to the act of breathing.—­Though I could draw wild blissful breath if I were galloping across the moors! her worn heart said to her youth:  and out of ken of the world, I could regain a portion of my self-esteem.  Nature thereat renewed her old sustainment with gentle murmurs, that were supported by Dr. Themison’s account of the virtuous married lady who chafed at the yoke on behalf of her sex, and deemed the independent union the ideal.  Nataly’s brain had a short gallop over moorland.  It brought her face to face with Victor’s girl, and she dropped once more to her remorse in herself and her reproaches of Nesta.  The girl had inherited from her father something of the cataract’s force which won its way by catching or by mastering, uprooting, ruining!