She pardoned them with some tenderness, on a suspicion that a quaint old high-frilled bleached and puckered Puritanical rectitude (her thoughts rose in pictures) possibly condemned the speculator as a description of gambler.  An erratic severity in ethics is easily overlooked by the enthusiast for things old English.  She was consciously ahead of them in the knowledge that her father had been, without the taint of gambling, a beneficent speculator.  The Montgomery colony in South Africa, and his dealings with the natives in India, and his Railways in South America, his establishment of Insurance Offices, which were Savings Banks, and the Stores for the dispensing of sound goods to the poor, attested it.  O and he was hospitable, the kindest, helpfullest of friends, the dearest, the very brightest of parents:  he was his girl’s playmate.  She could be critic of him, for an induction to the loving of him more justly:  yet if he had an excessive desire to win the esteem of people, as these keen young optics perceived in him, he strove to deserve it; and no one could accuse him of laying stress on the benefits he conferred.  Designedly, frigidly to wound a man so benevolent, appeared to her as an incomprehensible baseness.  The dropping of acquaintanceship with him, after the taste of its privileges, she ascribed, in the void of any better elucidation, to a mania of aristocratic conceit.  It drove her, despite her youthful contempt of politics, into a Radicalism that could find food in the epigrams of Mr. Colney Durance, even when they passed her understanding; or when he was not too distinctly seen by her to be shooting at all the parties of her beloved England, beneath the wicked semblance of shielding each by turns.

The young gentleman introduced to the Radnor Concert-parties by Lady Grace Halley as the Hon. Dudley Sowerby, had to bear the sins of his class.  Though he was tall, straight-featured, correct in costume, appearance, deportment, second son of a religious earl and no scandal to the parentage, he was less noticed by Nesta than the elderly and the commoners.  Her father accused her of snubbing him.  She reproduced her famous copy of the sugared acid of Mr. Dudley Sowerby’s closed mouth:  a sort of sneer in meekness, as of humility under legitimate compulsion; deploring Christianly a pride of race that stamped it for this cowled exhibition:  the wonderful mimicry was a flash thrown out by a born mistress of the art, and her mother was constrained to laugh, and so was her father; but he wilfully denied the likeness.  He charged her with encouraging Colney Durance to drag forth the sprig of nobility, in the nakedness of evicted shell-fish, on themes of the peril to England, possibly ruin, through the loss of that ruling initiative formerly possessed, in the days of our glory, by the titular nobles of the land.  Colney spoke it effectively, and the Hon. Dudley’s expressive lineaments showed print of the heaving word Alas, as when a target is penetrated, centrally.  And he was not a particularly dull fellow ’for his class and country,’ Colney admitted; adding:  ‘I hit his thought and out he came.’  One has, reluctantly with Victor Radnor, to grant, that when a man’s topmost unspoken thought is hit, he must be sharp on his guard to keep from coming out:—­we have won a right to him.