fructification."'
Virginia produced the sequent sentence, likewise weighty. Nesta stood
between the thin division of their beds, her right hand given to one, her
left to the other. They had the semblance of a haven out of storms.

She reflected, after shutting the door of their room, that the residing
with them had been a means of casting her--it was an effort to remember
how--upon the world where the tree of knowledge grows. She had eaten; and
she might be the worse for it; but she was raised to a height that would
not let her look with envy upon peace and comfort. Luxurious quiet people
were as ripening glass-house fruits. Her bitter gathering of the
knowledge of life had sharpened her intellect; and the intellect, even in
the young, is, and not less usefully, hard metal rather than fallow soil.
But for the fountain of human warmth at her breast, she might have been
snared by the conceit of intellect, to despise the simple and
conventional, or shed the pity which is charity's contempt. She had only
to think of the kindness of the dear good ladies; her heart jumped to
them at once. And when she fancied hearing those innocent souls of women
embracing her and reproaching her for the knowledge of life she now bore,
her words down deep in her bosom were: It has helped me to bear the shock
of other knowledge! How would she have borne it before she knew of the
infinitely evil? Saving for the tender compassion weeping over her
mother, she had not much acute personal grief.

For this world condemning her birth, was the world tolerant of that
infinitely evil! Her intellect fortified her to be combative by day,
after the night of imagination; which splendid power is not so
serviceable as the logical mind in painful seasons: for night revealed
the world snorting Dragon's breath at a girl guilty of knowing its
vilest. More than she liked to recall, it had driven her scorched, half
withered, to the shelter of Dudley. The daylight, spreading thin at the
windows, restored her from that weakness. 'We will quit England,' she
said, thinking of her mother and herself, and then of her father's surely
following them. She sighed thankfully, half way through the breakfast
with Skepsey, at sight of the hour by the clock; she was hurriedly
sentient of the puzzle of her feelings, when she guessed at a chance that
Dudley would be delayed. She supposed herself as possibly feeling not so
well able to keep every thought of her head brooding on her