This coming into the City daily of a girl, for the sake of walking back in winter weather with her father, struck her as ambiguous:  either a jealous foolish mother’s device, or that of a weak man beating about for protection.  But the woman of the positive world soon read to the contrary; helped a little by the man, no doubt.  She read rather too much to the contrary, and took the pedestrian girl for perfect simplicity in her tastes, when Nesta had so far grown watchful as to feel relieved by the lady’s departure.  Her mother, without sympathy for the lady, was too great of soul for jealousy.  Victor had his Nataly before him at a hint from Lady Grace:  and he went somewhat further than the exact degree when affirming, that Nataly could not scheme, and was incapable of suspecting.—­Nataly could perceive things with a certain accuracy:  she would not stoop to a meanness.  ‘Plot?  Nataly?’ said he, and shrugged.  In fact, the void of plot, drama, shuffle of excitement, reflected upon Nataly.  He might have seen as tragic as ever dripped on Stage, had he looked.

But the walk Westward with his girl, together with pride in a daughter who clove her way through all weathers, won his heart to exultation.  He told her:  ‘Fredi does her dada so much good’; not telling her in what, or opening any passage to the mystery of the man he was.  She was trying to be a student of life, with her eyes down upon hard earth, despite of her winged young head; she would have compassed him better had he dilated in sublime fashion; but he baffled her perusal of a man of power by the simpleness of his enjoyment of small things coming in his way;—­the lighted shops, the crowd, emergence from the crowd, or the meeting near midwinter of a soft warm wind along the Embankment, and dark Thames magnificently coroneted over his grimy flow.  There is no grasping of one who quickens us.

His flattery of his girl, too, restored her broken feeling of personal value; it permeated her nourishingly from the natural breath of him that it was.

At times he touched deep in humaneness; and he set her heart leaping on the flash of a thought to lay it bare, with the secret it held, for his help.  That was a dream.  She could more easily have uttered the words to Captain Dartrey, after her remembered abashing holy tremour of the vision of doing it and casting herself on noblest man’s compassionateness; and her imagined thousand emotions;—­a rolling music within her, a wreath of cloudglory in her sky;—­which had, as with virgins it may be, plighted her body to him for sheer urgency of soul; drawn her by a single unwitting-to-brain, conscious-in-blood, shy curl outward of the sheathing leaf to the flowering of woman to him; even to the shore of that strange sea, where the maid stands choosing this one man for her destiny, as in a trance.  So are these young ones unfolded, shade by shade; and a shade is all the difference with them; they can teach the poet to marvel at the immensity of vitality in ‘the shadow of a shade.’