pse of the
struggle he had gone through; love of her had helped him, she believed.
And she was melted; and not the less did the girl's implacable intuition
read with the keenness of eye of a man of the world the blunt division
in him, where warm humanity stopped short at the wall of social concrete
forming a part of this rightly esteemed young citizen. She, too, was
divided: she was at his feet; and she rebuked herself for daring to
judge--or rather, it was, for having a reserve in her mind upon a
man proving so generous with her. She was pulled this way and that
by sensibilities both inspiring to blind gratitude and quickening her
penetrative view. The certainty of an unerring perception remained.

Dorothea and Virginia were seated in the room below, waiting for their
carriage, when the hall-door spoke of the Hon. Dudley's departure; soon
after, Nesta entered to them. She swam up to Dorothea's lap, and dropped
her head on it, kneeling.

The ladies feared she might be weeping. Dorothea patted her thick brown
twisted locks of hair. Unhappiness following such an interview, struck
them as an ill sign.

Virginia bent to the girl's ear, and murmured: 'All well?'

She replied: 'He has been very generous.'

Her speaking of the words renewed an oppression, that had darkened her
on the descent of stairs. For sensibilities sharp as Nesta's, are not to
be had without their penalties: and she who had gone nigh to summing in
a flash the nature of Dudley, sank suddenly under that affliction often
besetting the young adventurous mind, crushing to young women:--the
fascination exercised upon them by a positive adverse masculine attitude
and opinion. Young men know well what it is: and if young women have
by chance overcome their timidity, to the taking of any step out of
the trim pathway, they shrink, with a sense of forlornest isolation. It
becomes a subjugation; inciting to revolt, but a heavy weight to cast
off. Soon it assumed its material form for the contention between
her and Dudley, in the figure of Mrs. Marsett. The Nesta who had been
instructed to know herself to be under a shadow, heard, she almost
justified Dudley's reproaches to her, for having made the acquaintance
of the unhappy woman, for having visited her, for having been, though
but for a minute, at the mercy of a coarse gentleman's pursuit. The
recollection was a smart buffet.

Her lighted mind punished her thus through her conjuring of Dudley's
words, should