ent of the baser unblest half, which he hugged and distrusted.
Can innocence issue of the guilty? He asked it, hopeing it might be
possible: he had been educated in his family to believe, that the laws
governing human institutions are divine--until History has altered them.
They are altered, to present a fresh bulwark against the infidel. His
conservative mind, retiring in good order, occupied the next rearward
post of resistance. Secretly behind it, the man was proud of having
a heart to beat for the cause of the besiegeing enemy, in the present
instance. When this was blabbed to him, and he had owned it, he
attributed his weakness to excess of nature, the liking for a fair
face.--Oh, but more! spirit was in the sweet eyes. She led him--she did
lead him in spiritual things; led him out of common circles of thought,
into refreshing new spheres; he had reminiscences of his having relished
the juices of the not quite obviously comic, through her indications:
and really, in spite of her inferior flimsy girl's education, she could
boast her acquirements; she was quick, startlingly; modest, too, in
commerce with a slower mind that carried more; though she laughed
and was a needle for humour: she taught him at times to put away his
contempt of the romantic; she had actually shown him, that his expressed
contempt of it disguised a dread: as it did, and he was conscious of the
foolishness of it now while pursuing her image, while his intelligence
and senses gave her the form and glory of young morning.

Wariness counselled him to think it might be merely the play of her
youth; and also the disposition of a man in harness of business,
exaggeratingly to prize an imagined finding of the complementary
feminine of himself. Venerating purity as he did, the question, whether
the very sweetest of pure young women, having such an origin, must not
at some time or other show trace of the origin, surged up. If he could
only have been sure of her moral exemption from taint, a generous
ardour, in reserve behind his anxious dubieties, would have precipitated
Dudley to quench disapprobation and brave the world under a buckler of
those monetary advantages, which he had but stoutly to plead with the
House of Cantor, for the speedy overcoming of a reluctance to receive
the nameless girl and prodigious heiress. His family's instruction of
him, and his inherited tastes, rendered the aspect of a Nature stripped
of the clothing of the laws offensive d