‘And French and good!’ Mrs. Marsett ejaculated.  ’My Ned reads French novels, and he says, their women . . . .  But your mademoiselle is a real one.  If she says all that, I could kneel to her, French or not.  Does she talk much about men and women?’

’Not often:  we lose our tempers.  She wants women to have professions; at present they have not much choice to avoid being penniless.  Poverty, and the sight of luxury!  It seems as if we produced the situation, to create an envious thirst, and cause the misery.  Things are improving for them; but we groan at the slowness of it.’

Mrs. Marsett now declared a belief, that women were nearly quite as bad as men.  ’I don’t think I could take up with a profession.  Unless to be a singer.  Ah!  Do you sing?’

Nesta smiled:  ‘Yes, I sing.’

’How I should like to hear you!  My Ned’s a thorough Englishman—­gentleman, you know:  he cares only for sport; Shooting, Fishing, Hunting; and Football, Cricket, Rowing, and matches.  He’s immensely proud of England in those things.  And such muscle he has! though he begins to fancy his heart’s rather weak.  It’s digestion, I tell him.  But he takes me to the Opera sometimes—­Italian Opera; he can’t stand German.  Down at his place in Leicestershire, he tells me, when there ’s company, he has—­I’m sure you sing beautifully.  When I hear beautiful singing, even from a woman they tell tales of, upon my word, it’s true, I feel my sins all melting out of me and I’m new-made:  I can’t bear Ned to speak.  Would you one day, one afternoon, before the end of next week?—­it would do me such real good, you can’t guess how much; if I could persuade you!  I know I’m asking something out of rules.  For just half an hour:  I judge by your voice in talking.  Oh! it would do me good-good-good to hear you sing.  There is a tuned piano—­a cottage; I don’t think it sounds badly.  You would not see any great harm in calling on me? once!’

‘No,’ said Nesta.  And it was her nature that projected the word.  Her awakened wits were travelling to her from a distance, and she had an intimation of their tidings; and she could not have said what they were; or why, for a moment, she hesitated to promise she would come.  Her vision of the reality of things was without written titles, to put the stamp of the world on it.  She felt this lady to be one encompassed and in the hug of the elementary forces, which are the terrors to inexperienced pure young women.  But she looked at her, and dared trust those lips, those eyes.  She saw, through whatever might be the vessel, the spirit of the woman; as the upper nobility of our brood are enabled to do in a crisis mixed of moral aversion and sisterly sympathy, when nature cries to them, and the scales of convention, the mud-spots of accident, even naughtiness, even wickedness, all misfortune’s issue, if we but see the one look upward, fall away.  Reason is not excluded from these blind throbs of a blood that strikes to right the doings of the Fates.