y concerned Nesta.
He fell to brooding on it, until he wondered why he had not been made a
trifle anxious by the reading of the note overnight. Skepsey was left at
Nesta's house.

Dartrey found himself expected by the servant waiting on Mrs. Marsett.

CHAPTER XXXII

SHOWS HOW TEMPER MAY KINDLE TEMPER AND AN INDIGNANT WOMAN GET HER WEAPON

Judith Marsett stood in her room to receive Nesta's hero. She was
flushed, and had thinned her lips for utterance of a desperate thing,
after the first severe formalities.

Her aim was to preserve an impressive decorum. She was at the same time
burning to speak out furious wrath, in words of savage rawness, if they
should come, as a manner of slapping the world's cheek for the state to
which it reduces its women; whom one of the superior creatures can
insult, and laugh.

Men complaining of the 'peace which is near their extinction,' have but
to shuffle with the sex; they will experience as remarkable a change as
if they had passed off land on to sea.

Dartrey had some flitting notion of the untamed original elements women
can bring about us, in his short observant bow to Mrs. Marsett, following
so closely upon the scene with Mrs. Blathenoy.

But this handsome woman's look of the dull red line of a sombre fire,
that needed only stir of a breath to shoot the blaze, did not at all
alarm him. He felt refreshingly strung by it.

She was discerned at a glance to be an aristocratic member of regions
where the senses perpetually simmer when they are not boiling. The talk
at the Club recurred to him. How could Nesta have come to know the woman?
His questioning of the chapter of marvellous accidents, touched Nesta
simply, as a young girl to be protected, without abhorrently involving
the woman. He had his ideas of the Spirit of Woman stating her case to
the One Judge, for lack of an earthly just one: a story different from
that which is proclaimed pestilential by the body of censors under
conservatory glass; where flesh is delicately nurtured, highly prized;
spirit not so much so; and where the pretty tricking of the flesh is
taken for a spiritual ascendancy.

In spite of her turbulent breast's burden to deliver, Mrs. Marsett's
feminine acuteness was alive upon Dartrey, confirming here and there
Nesta's praises of him. She liked his build and easy carriage of a
muscular frame: her Ned was a heavy man. More than Dartrey's figure, as
she would have said, though the estimate came