tfulness, with threads of personal disgust, the scene, striking
him drearly like a distant great mansion's conflagration across moorland
at midnight, of a lady's breach of bonds and plunge of all for love. How
had it been concealed? In Dudley's upper sphere, everything was exposed:
Scandal walked naked and unashamed-figurante of the polite world. But
still this lady was of the mint and coin, a true lady. Handsome now,
she must have been beautiful. And a comprehensible pride (for so would
Dudley have borne it) keeps the forsaken man silent up to death:...
grandly silent; but the loss of such a woman is enough to kill a man!
Not in time, though! Legitimacy evidently, by the mother's confession,
cannot protect where it is wanted. Dudley was optically affected by a
round spot of the world swinging its shadow over Nesta.

He pitied, and strove to be sensible of her. The effort succeeded so
well, that he was presently striving to be insensible. The former state,
was the mounting of a wall; the latter, was a sinking through a chasm.
There would be family consultations, abhorrent; his father's agonized
amazement at the problem presented to a family of scrupulous principles
and pecuniary requirements; his mother's blunt mention of the abominable
name--mediaevally vindicated in champions of certain princely families
indeed, but morally condemned; always under condemnation of the Church:
a blot: and handed down: Posterity, and it might be a titled posterity,
crying out. A man in the situation of Dudley could not think solely of
himself. The nobles of the land are bound in honour to their posterity.
There you have one of the prominent permanent distinctions between them
and the commonalty.

His mother would again propose her chosen bride for him: Edith Averst,
with the dowry of a present one thousand pounds per annum, and prospect
of six or so, excluding Sir John's estate, Carping, in Leicestershire; a
fair estate, likely to fall to Edith; consumption seized her brothers as
they ripened. A fair girl too; only Dudley did not love her; he wanted
to love. He was learning the trick from this other one, who had become
obscured and diminished, tainted, to the thought of her; yet not
extinct. Sight of her was to be dreaded.

Unguiltily tainted, in herself she was innocent. That constituted the
unhappy invitation to him to swallow one half of his feelings, which
had his world's blessing on it, for the beneficial enlargement and
enthronem