ed, and had thinned her lips for utterance of a desperate thing,
after the first severe formalities.

Her aim was to preserve an impressive decorum. She was at the same time
burning to speak out furious wrath, in words of savage rawness, if they
should come, as a manner of slapping the world's cheek for the state
to which it reduces its women; whom one of the superior creatures can
insult, and laugh.

Men complaining of the 'peace which is near their extinction,' have but
to shuffle with the sex; they will experience as remarkable a change as
if they had passed off land on to sea.

Dartrey had some flitting notion of the untamed original elements
women can bring about us, in his short observant bow to Mrs. Marsett,
following so closely upon the scene with Mrs. Blathenoy.

But this handsome woman's look of the dull red line of a sombre fire,
that needed only stir of a breath to shoot the blaze, did not at all
alarm him. He felt refreshingly strung by it.

She was discerned at a glance to be an aristocratic member of regions
where the senses perpetually simmer when they are not boiling. The
talk at the Club recurred to him. How could Nesta have come to know the
woman? His questioning of the chapter of marvellous accidents, touched
Nesta simply, as a young girl to be protected, without abhorrently
involving the woman. He had his ideas of the Spirit of Woman stating
her case to the One Judge, for lack of an earthly just one: a story
different from that which is proclaimed pestilential by the body of
censors under conservatory glass; where flesh is delicately nurtured,
highly prized; spirit not so much so; and where the pretty tricking of
the flesh is taken for a spiritual ascendancy.

In spite of her turbulent breast's burden to deliver, Mrs. Marsett's
feminine acuteness was alive upon Dartrey, confirming here and there
Nesta's praises of him. She liked his build and easy carriage of a
muscular frame: her Ned was a heavy man. More than Dartrey's figure,
as she would have said, though the estimate came second, she liked his
manner with her. Not a doubt was there, that he read her position. She
could impose upon some: not upon masculine eyes like these. They did
not scrutinize, nor ruffle a smooth surface with a snap at petty
impressions; and they were not cynically intimate or dominating or
tentatively amorous: clear good fellowship was in them. And it was a
blessedness (whatever might be her feeling later, when she ca