'On this
occasion?' Mr. Stuart Rem named a linendraper's establishment near the
pantiles, where a fair young woman served. 'And her reputation?' That
was an article less presentable through plate-glass, it seemed: Mr.
Stuart Rem drew a prolonged breath into his nose.

'It is most melancholy!' they said in unison. 'Nothing positive,' said
he. 'But the suspicion of a shadow, Mr. Stuart Rem! You will not
permit it?' He stated, that his friend Buttermore might have influence.
Dorothea said: 'When I think of Mr. Posterley's addiction to ceremonial
observances, and to matrimony, I cannot but think of a sentence that
fell from Mr. Durance one day, with reference to that division of our
Church: he called it:--you frown! and I would only quote Mr. Durance
to you in support of your purer form, as we hold it to be--with the
candles, the vestments, Confession, alas! he called it, "Rome and a
wife."'

Mr. Stuart Rem nodded an enforced assent: he testily dismissed mention
of Mr. Durance, and resumed on Mr. Posterley.

The good ladies now, with some of their curiosity appeased,
considerately signified to him, that a young maiden was present.

The young maiden had in heart stuff to render such small gossip a hum
of summer midges. She did not imagine the dialogue concerned her in any
way. She noticed Mr. Stuart Rem's attentive scrutiny of her from time
to time. She had no sensitiveness, hardly a mind for things about her.
To-morrow she was to see Captain Dartrey. She dwelt on that prospect,
for an escape from the meshes of a painful hour--the most woeful of the
hours she had yet known-passed with Judith Marsett: which dragged her
soul through a weltering of the deeps, tossed her over and over, still
did it with her ideas. It shocked her nevertheless to perceive how much
of the world's flayed life and harsh anatomy she had apprehended, and
so coldly, previous to Mrs. Marsett's lift of the veil in her story
of herself: a skipping revelation, terrible enough to the girl; whose
comparison of the previously suspected things with the things now
revealed imposed the thought of her having been both a precocious and
a callous young woman: a kind of 'Delphica without the erudition,' her
mind phrased it airily over her chagrin.--And the silence of Dudley
proved him to have discovered his error in choosing such a person--he
was wise, and she thanked him. She had an envy of the ignorant-innocents
adored by the young man she cordially thanked fo