eces of costly China, with the settled smile, and cold. She saw
but the outside of them, and she continued reporting the variations,
which steadily determined the warmth. On the night of the third day, they
kissed her tenderly; they were human figures.

No one could be aware of the trial undergone by the good ladies in
receiving her: Victor's child; but, as their phrase would have run, had
they dared to give it utterance to one another, a child of sin. How
foreign to them, in that character, how strange, when she was looked on
as an inhabitant of their house, they hardly dared to estimate; until the
timorous estimation, from gradually swelling, suddenly sank; nature
invaded them; they could discard the alienating sense of the taint; and
not only did they no longer fear the moment when Mr. Stuart Rem or Mr.
Posterley might call for evening tea, but they consulted upon inviting
the married one of those gentlemen, to 'divert dear Nesta.' Every night
she slept well. In all she did, she proved she was 'of the blood.' She
had Victor's animated eyes; she might have, they dreaded to think, his
eloquence. They put it down to his eloquence entirely, that their
resistance to his petition had been overcome, for similarly with the
treatment of the private acts of royal personages by lacquey History,
there is, in the minds of the ultra-civilized, an insistance, that any
event having a consequence in matters personal to them, be at all hazards
recorded with the utmost nicety in decency. By such means, they preserve
the ceremonial self-respect, which is a necessity of their existence; and
so they maintain the regal elevation over the awe-struck subjects of
their interiors; who might otherwise revolt, pull down, scatter,
dishonour, expose for a shallow fiction the holiest, the most vital to
them. A democratic evil spirit is abroad, generated among congregations,
often perilously communicating its wanton laughter to the desperate
wickedness they know (not solely through the monition of Mr. Stuart Rem)
to lurk within. It has to be excluded: on certain points they must not
think. The night of Tasso was darkly clouded in the minds of the pure
ladies: a rift would have seized their half-slumbering sense of smell, to
revive the night, perhaps disorder the stately march of their
intelligences.

Victor's eloquence, Victor's influence, Victor's child he carried them as
a floodstream, insomuch, that their reception of this young creature of
the