Those wits of the virgin young, quickened to shrewdness by their budding senses—­and however vividly—­require enlightenment of the audible and visible before their sterner feelings can be heated to break them away from a blushful dread and force the mind to know.  As much as the wilfully or naturally blunted, the intelligently honest have to learn by touch:  only, their understandings cannot meanwhile be so wholly obtuse as our society’s matron, acting to please the tastes of the civilized man—­a creature that is not clean-washed of the Turk in him—­barbarously exacts.  The signor aforesaid is puzzled to read the woman, who is after all in his language; but when it comes to reading the maiden, she appears as a phosphorescent hieroglyph to some speculative Egyptologer; and he insists upon distinct lines and characters; no variations, if he is to have sense of surety.  Many a young girl is misread by the amount she seems to know of our construction, history, and dealings, when it is not more than her sincere ripeness of nature, that has gathered the facts of life profuse about her, and prompts her through one or other of the instincts, often vanity, to show them to be not entirely strange to her; or haply her filly nature is having a fling at the social harness of hypocrisy.  If you (it is usually through the length of ears of your Novelist that the privilege is yours) have overheard queer communications passing between girls, and you must act the traitor eavesdropper or Achilles masquerader to overhear so clearly, these, be assured, are not specially the signs of their corruptness.  Even the exceptionally cynical are chiefly to be accused of bad manners.  Your Moralist is a myopic preacher, when he stamps infamy, on them, or on our later generation, for the kick they have at grandmother decorum, because you do not or cannot conceal from them the grinning skeleton behind it.

Nesta once had dreams of her being loved:  and she was to love in return for a love that excused her for loving double, treble; as not her lover could love, she thought with grateful pride in the treasure she was to pour out at his feet; as only one or two (and they were women) in the world had ever loved.  Her notion of the passion was parasitic:  man the tree, woman the bine:  but the bine was flame to enwind and to soar, serpent to defend, immortal flowers to crown.  The choice her parents had made for her in Dudley, behind the mystery she had scent of, nipped her dream, and prepared her to meet, as it were, the fireside of a November day instead of springing up and into the dawn’s blue of full summer with swallows on wing.  Her station in exile at the Wells of the weariful rich, under the weight of the sullen secret, unenlivened by Dudley’s courtship, subdued her to the world’s decrees; phrased thus:  ’I am not to be a heroine.’  The one golden edge to the view was, that she would greatly please her father.