home than with her parents. He and the cool world
he moved in were a transparency of peace to her mind; even to his giving
of some portion of it, when she had the dear little man present to her in
a vivid image of a fish in a glass globe, wandering round and round, now
and then shooting across, just as her Skepsey did: he carried his head
semihorizontally at his arrowy pace; plain to read though he was, he
appeared, under that image created of him, animated by motives inducing
to speculation.

She thought of him till she could have reproached him for not returning
and helping her to get away from the fever of other thoughts:--this
anguish twisting about her parents, and the dreadful trammels of
gratitude to a man afflictingly generous, the frown of congregated
people.

The latter was the least of evils; she had her charges to bring against
them for injustice: uncited, unstirred charges, they were effective as a
muffled force to sustain her: and the young who are of healthy lively
blood and clean conscience have either emotion or imagination to fold
them defensively from an enemy world; whose power to drive them forth
into the wilderness they acknowledge. But in the wilderness their souls
are not beaten down by breath of mortals; they burn straight flame there
up to the parent Spirit.

She could not fancy herself flying thither;--where to be shorn and naked
and shivering is no hardship, for the solitude clothes, and the sole true
life in us resolves to that steady flame;--she was restrained by Dudley's
generosity, which held her fast to have the forgiveness for her
uncommitted sin dashed in her face. He surprised her; the unexpected
quality in him seemed suddenly to have snared her fast: and she did not
obtain release after seeing behind it;--seeing it, by the light of what
she demanded, personal, shallow, a lover's generosity. So her keen
intellect saw it; and her young blood (for the youthful are thus divided)
thrilled in thinking it must be love! The name of the sacred passion
lifted it out of the petty cabin of the individual into a quiring
cathedral universal, and subdued her. It subdued her with an unwelcome
touch of tenderness when she thought of it as involving tenderness for
her mother, some chivalrous respect for her mother. Could he love the
daughter without some little, which a more intimate knowledge of her dear
mother would enlarge? The girl's heart flew to her mother, clung to her,
vindicated her dumbly