ured of him, as being the
man who might be spoken to; and by a woman: though not by a girl; not
spoken to by her. The throb of the impulse precipitating speech subsided
to a dumb yearning. He noticed her look: he was unaware of the human sun
in the girl's eyes taking an image of him for permanent habitation in
her breast. That face of his, so clearly lined, quick, firm, with the
blue smile on it like the gleam of a sword coming out of sheath, did not
mean hardness, she could have vowed. O that some woman, other than the
unhappy woman herself, would speak the words denied to a girl! He was
the man who would hearken and help. Essential immediate help was to be
given besides the noble benevolence of mind. Novel ideas of manliness
and the world's need for it were printed on her understanding. For what
could women do in aid of a good cause! She fawned: she deemed herself
very despicably her hero's inferior. The thought of him enclosed her. In
a prison, the gaoler is a demi-God-hued bright or black, as it may be;
and, by the present arrangement between the sexes, she, whom the world
allowed not to have an intimation from eye or ear, or from nature's
blood-ripeness in commune with them, of certain matters, which it
suffers to be notorious, necessarily directed her appeal almost in
worship to the man, who was the one man endowed to relieve, and who
locked her mouth for shame.

Thus was she, too, being put into her woman's harness of the bit and
the blinkers, and taught to know herself for the weak thing, the gentle
parasite, which the fiction of our civilization expects her, caressingly
and contemptuously, to become in the active, while it is exacted of
hero Comedy of Clowns!--that in the passive she be a rockfortress
impregnable, not to speak of magically encircled. She must also have
her feelings; she must not be an unnatural creature. And she must have
a sufficient intelligence; for her stupidity does not flatter the
possessing man. It is not an organic growth that he desires in his mate,
but a happy composition. You see the world which comes of the pair.

This burning Nesta, Victor's daughter, tempered by Nataly's milder
blood, was a girl in whom the hard shocks of the knowledge of life,
perforce of the hardness upon pure metal, left a strengthening for
generous imagination. She did not sit to brood on her injured senses
or set them through speculation touching heat; they were taken up
and consumed by the fire of her mind.