And on that ground, it started the voluble defence.  For certain suspected things will dash suspicion to the rebound, when they are very dark.  As soon as the charge against her was moderated, the defence expired.  He heard the world delivering its judgement upon her; and he sorrowfully acquiesced.  She passed from him.

When she was cut off, she sang him in the distance a remembered saying of hers, with the full melody of her voice.  One day, treating of modern pessimism, he had draped a cadaverous view of our mortal being in a quotation of the wisdom of the Philosopher Emperor:  ’To set one’s love upon the swallow is a futility.’  And she, weighing it, nodded, and replied:  ’May not the pleasure for us remain if we set our love upon the beauty of the swallow’s flight?’

There was, for a girl, a bit of idea, real idea, in that meaning, of course, the picture we are to have of the bird’s wings in motion, it has often been admired.  Oh! not much of an idea in itself:  feminine and vague.  But it was pertinent, opportune; in this way she stimulated.  And the girl who could think it, and call on a Mrs. Marsett, was of the class of mixtures properly to be handed over to chemical experts for analysis!

She had her aspirations on behalf of her sex:  she and Mademoiselle de Seilles discussed them; women were to do this, do that:—­necessarily a means of instructing a girl to learn what they did do.  If the lower part of her face had been as reassuring to him as the upper, he might have put a reluctant faith in the pure-mindedness of these aspirations, without reverting to her origin, and also to recent rumours of her father and Lady Grace Halley.  As it was, he inquired of the cognizant, whether an intellectual precocity, devoted by preference to questions affecting the state of women, did not rather more than suggest the existence of urgent senses likewise.  She, a girl under twenty, had an interest in public matters, and she called on a Mrs. Marsett.  To plead her simplicity, was to be absolutely ignorant of her.

He neighboured sagacity when he pointed that interrogation relating to Nesta’s precociousness of the intelligence.  For, as they say in dactylomancy, the ‘psychical’ of women are not disposed in their sensitive early days to dwell upon the fortunes of their sex:  a thought or two turns them facing away, with the repugnant shiver.  They worship at a niche in the wall.  They cannot avoid imputing some share of foulness to them that are for scouring the chamber; and the civilized male, keeping his own chamber locked, quite shares their pale taper’s view.  The full-blooded to the finger-tips, on the other hand, are likely to be drawn to the subject, by noble inducement as often as by base:  Nature at flood being the cause in either instance.  This young Nature of the good and the bad, is the blood which runs to power of heart as well as to thirsts of the flesh.  Then have men to sound themselves, to discover how