mes 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.'

Her father shut the glimpse of a possible speaking to him of Mrs.
Marsett, with a renewal of his eulogistic allusions to Dudley Sowerby:
the 'perfect gentleman, good citizen'; prospective heir to an earldom
besides. She bowed to Dudley's merits; she read off the honorific
pedimental letters of a handsome statue, for a sign to herself that she
passed it.

She was unjust, as Victor could feel, though he did not know how coldly
unjust. For among the exorbitant requisitions upon their fellow-creatures
made by the young, is the demand, that they be definite: no mercy is in
them for the transitional. And Dudley--and it was under her influence,
and painfully, not ignobly--was in process of development: interesting to
philosophers, if not to maidens.

Victor accused her of paying too much heed to Colney Durance's epigrams
upon their friends. He quite joined with his English world in its
opinion, that epigrams are poor squibs when they do not come out of great
guns. Epigrams fired at a venerable nation, are surely the poorest of
popgun paper pellets. The English kick at the insolence, when they are
not in the mood for pelleting themselves, or when the armed Foreigner is
overshadowing and braceing. Colney's pretentious and laboured Satiric
Prose Epic of 'THE RIVAL TONGUES,' particularly offended him, as being a
clever aim at no hitting; and sustained him, inasmuch as it was an acid
friend's collapse. How could Colney expect his English to tolerate such a
spiteful d