rous character, to let her moods divert and command her thoughts of
persons.

Her thoughts were at this time singularly lucid upon everything about
her; with the one exception of the reason why she had come to favour
Dudley, and how it was she had been smitten by that woman at Brighton to
see herself in her position altogether with the world's relentless,
unexamining hard eyes. Bitterness added, of Mrs. Marsett: She is made an
honest woman!--And there was a strain of the lower in Nataly, to reproach
the girl for causing the reflection to be cast on the unwedded. Otherwise
her mind was open; she was of aid to Victor in his confusion over some
lost Idea he had often touched on latterly. And she was the one who sent
him ahead at a trot under a light, by saying: 'You would found a new and
more stable aristocracy of the contempt of luxury' when he talked of
combatting the Jews with a superior weapon. That being, in fact, as
Colney Durance had pointed out to him, the weapon of self-conquest used
by them 'before they fell away to flesh-pottery.' Was it his Idea? He
fancied an aching at the back of his head when he speculated. But his
Idea had been surpassingly luminous, alive, a creation; and this came
before him with the yellow skin of a Theory, bred, born of books. Though
Nataly's mention of the aristocracy of self-denying discipline struck a
Lucifer in his darkness.

Nesta likewise helped: but more in what she did than in what she said:
she spoke intelligently enough to make him feel a certain increase of
alarm, amounting to a cursory secret acknowledgement of it, both at her
dealings with Dudley and with himself. She so quietly displaced the lady
visiting him at the City offices. His girl's disregard of hostile
weather, and her company, her talk, delighted him: still he remonstrated,
at her coming daily. She came: nor was there an instigation on the part
of her mother, clearly none: her mother asked him once whether he thought
she met the dreadful Brighton woman. His Fredi drove constantly to walk
back beside him Westward, as he loved to do whenever it was practicable;
and exceeding the flattery of his possession of the gallant daughter, her
conversation charmed him to forget a disappointment caused by the defeat
and entire exclusion of the lady visiting him so complimentarily for his
advice on stocks, shares, mines, et caetera. The lady resisted; she was
vanquished, as the shades are displaced by simple apparition of dayl