They had done evil to no one as yet.  Nataly thought that; not-withstanding the outcry of the ancient and withered woman who bore Victor Radnor’s name:  for whom, in consequence of the rod the woman had used, this tenderest of hearts could summon no emotion.  If she had it, the thing was not to be hauled up to consciousness.  Her feeling was, that she forgave the wrinkled Malignity:  pity and contrition dissolving in the effort to produce the placable forgiveness.  She was frigid because she knew rightly of herself, that she in the place of power would never have struck so meanly.  But the mainspring of the feeling in an almost remorseless bosom drew from certain chance expressions of retrospective physical distaste on Victor’s part;—­hard to keep from a short utterance between the nuptial two, of whom the unshamed exuberant male has found the sweet reverse in his mate, a haven of heavenliness, to delight in:—­these conjoined with a woman’s unspoken pleading ideas of her own, on her own behalf, had armed her jealously in vindication of Nature.

Now, as long as they did no palpable wrong about them, Nataly could argue her case in her conscience—­deep down and out of hearing, where women under scourge of the laws they have not helped decree may and do deliver their minds.  She stood in that subterranean recess for Nature against the Institutions of Man:  a woman little adapted for the post of revel; but to this, by the agency of circumstances, it had come; she who was designed by nature to be an ornament of those Institutions opposed them and when thinking of the rights and the conduct of the decrepit Legitimate—­virulent in a heathen vindictiveness declaring itself holy—­she had Nature’s logic, Nature’s voice, for self-defence.  It was eloquent with her, to the deafening of other voices in herself, even to the convincing of herself, when she was wrought by the fires within to feel elementally.  The other voices within her issued of the acknowledged dues to her family and to the world—­the civilization protecting women:  sentences thereanent in modern books and Journals.  But the remembrance of moods of fiery exaltation, when the Nature she called by name of Love raised the chorus within to stop all outer buzzing, was, in a perpetual struggle with a whirlpool, a constant support while she and Victor were one at heart.  The sense of her standing alone made her sway; and a thought of differences with him caused frightful apprehensions of the abyss.

Luxuriously she applied to his public life for witness that he had governed wisely as well as affectionately so long; and he might therefore, with the chorussing of the world of public men, expect a woman blindfold to follow his lead.  But no; we may be rebels against our time and its Laws:  if we are really for Nature, we are not lawless.  Nataly’s untutored scruples, which came side by side with her ability to plead for her acts, restrained her from complicity in the ensnaring of a young man of social rank to