as he argued,
we cannot keep the poisonous matter out, mothers should prepare and
strengthen young women for the encounter with it, by lifting the veil,
baring the world, giving them knowledge to arm them for the fight they
have to sustain; and thereby preserve them further from the spiritual
collapse which follows the nursing of a false ideal of our life in
youth:--this being, Colney said, the prominent feminine disease of the
time, common to all our women; that is, all having leisure to shine in
the sun or wave in the wind as flowers of the garden.

Whatever there was of wisdom in his view, he spoilt it for English
hearing, by making use of his dry compressed sentences. Besides he was a
bachelor; therefore but a theorist. And his illustrations of his
theory were grotesque; meditation on them extracted a corrosive acid to
consume, in horrid derision, the sex, the nation, the race of man. The
satirist too devotedly loves his lash to be a persuasive teacher. Nataly
had excuses to cover her reasons for not listening to him.

One reason was, as she discerned through her confusion at the thought,
that the day drew near for her speaking fully to Nesta; when, between
what she then said and what she said now, a cruel contrast might strike
the girl and in toneing revelations now, to be more consonant with
them then;--in softening and shading the edges of social misconduct, it
seemed painfully possible to be sowing in the girl's mind something
like the reverse of moral precepts, even to smoothing the way to a
rebelliousness partly or wholly similar to her own. But Nataly's chief
and her appeasing reason for pursuing the conventional system with this
exceptional young creature, referred to the sentiments on that subject
of the kind of young man whom a mother elects from among those present
and eligible, as perhaps next to worthy to wed the girl, by virtue of
good promise in the moral department. She had Mr. Dudley Sowerby under
view; far from the man of her choice and still the practice of decorum,
discretion, a pardonable fastidiousness, appears, if women may make any
forecast of the behaviour of young men or may trust the faces they
see, to, promise a future stability in the husband. Assuredly a Dudley
Sowerby would be immensely startled to find in his bride a young woman
more than babily aware of the existence of one particular form of
naughtiness on earth.

Victor was of no help: he had not an idea upon the right education