d fortune for her, we can't let it pass her.'

A pang of the resolution now to debate the case with Victor, which
would be of necessity to do the avoided thing and roll up the forbidden
curtain opening on their whole history past and prospective, was met in
Nataly's bosom by the more bitter immediate confession that she was
not his match. To speak would be to succumb; and shamefully after the
effort; and hopelessly after being overborne by him. There was not the
anticipation of a set contest to animate the woman's naturally valiant
heart; he was too strong: and his vividness in urgency overcame her in
advance, fascinated her sensibility through recollection; he fanned an
inclination, lighted it to make it a passion, a frenzied resolve--she
remembered how and when. She had quivering cause to remember the fateful
day of her step, in a letter received that morning from a married
sister, containing no word of endearment or proposal for a meeting. An
unregretted day, if Victor would think of the dues to others; that is,
would take station with the world to see his reflected position, instead
of seeing it through their self-justifying knowledge of the honourable
truth of their love, and pressing to claim and snatch at whatsoever the
world bestows on its orderly subjects.

They had done evil to no one as yet. Nataly thought that;
not-withstanding the outcry of the ancient and withered woman who bore
Victor Radnor's name: for whom, in consequence of the rod the woman had
used, this tenderest of hearts could summon no emotion. If she had it,
the thing was not to be hauled up to consciousness. Her feeling was,
that she forgave the wrinkled Malignity: pity and contrition dissolving
in the effort to produce the placable forgiveness. She was frigid
because she knew rightly of herself, that she in the place of power
would never have struck so meanly. But the mainspring of the feeling
in an almost remorseless bosom drew from certain chance expressions of
retrospective physical distaste on Victor's part;--hard to keep from a
short utterance between the nuptial two, of whom the unshamed exuberant
male has found the sweet reverse in his mate, a haven of heavenliness,
to delight in:--these conjoined with a woman's unspoken pleading ideas
of her own, on her own behalf, had armed her jealously in vindication of
Nature.

Now, as long as they did no palpable wrong about them, Nataly could
argue her case in her conscience--deep down and out