At home Victor discovered, that there was not much more than a truce between Nesta and Nataly.  He had a medical hint from Dr. Themison, and he counselled his girl to humour her mother as far as could be:  particularly in relation to Dudley, whom Nataly now, womanlike, after opposing, strongly favoured.  How are we ever to get a clue to the labyrinthine convolutions and changeful motives of the sex!  Dartrey’s theories were absurd.  Did Nataly think them dangerous for a young woman?  The guess hinted at a clue of some sort to the secret of her veering.

‘Mr. Sowerby left me with an adieu,’ said Nesta.

’Mr. Sowerby!  My dear, he is bound, bound in honour, bound at heart.  You did not dismiss him?’

’I repeated the word he used.  I thought of mother.  The blood leaves her cheeks at a disappointment now.  She has taken to like him.’

‘Why, you like him!’

‘I could not vow.’

‘Tush.’

‘Ah, don’t press me, dada.  But you will see, he has disengaged himself.’

He had done it, though not in formal speech.  Slow digestion of his native antagonism to these Bohemians, to say nothing of his judicial condemnation of them, brought him painfully round to the writing of a letter to Nataly; cunningly addressed to the person on whom his instinct told him he had the strongest hold.

She schooled herself to discuss the detested matter forming Dudley’s grievance and her own with Nesta; and it was a woeful half-hour for them.  But Nataly was not the weeper.

Another interview ensued between Nesta and her suitor.  Dudley bore no resemblance to Mr. Barmby, who refused to take the word no from her, and had taken it, and had gone to do holy work, for which she revered him.  Dudley took the word, leaving her to imagine freedom, until once more her mother or her father, inspired by him, came interceding, her mother actually supplicating.  So that the reality of Dudley’s love rose to conception like a London dawn over Nesta; and how, honourably, decently, positively, to sever herself from it, grew to be an ill-visaged problem.  She glanced in soul at Dartrey Fenellan for help; she had her wild thoughts.  Having once called him Dartrey, the virginal barrier to thoughts was broken; and but for love of her father, for love and pity of her mother, she would have ventured the step to make the man who had her whole being in charge accept or reject her.  Nothing else appeared in prospect.  Her father and mother were urgently one to favour Dudley; and the sensitive gentleman presented himself to receive his wound and to depart with it.  But always he returned.  At last, as if under tuition, he refrained from provoking a wound; he stood there to win her upon any terms; and he was a handsome figure, acknowledged by the damsel to be increasing in good looks as more and more his pretensions became distasteful to her.  The slight cast of sourness on his lower features had almost vanished, his nature seemed to have enlarged.  He complimented her for her ‘generous benevolence,’ vaguely, yet with evident sincereness; he admitted, that the modern world is ’attempting difficulties with at least commendable intentions’; and that the position of women demands improvement, consideration for them also.  He said feelingly:  ’They have to bear extraordinary burdens!’ There he stopped.