r aspirations on behalf of her sex: she and Mademoiselle de
Seilles discussed them; women were to do this, do that:--necessarily a
means of instructing a girl to learn what they did do. If the lower part
of her face had been as reassuring to him as the upper, he might have
put a reluctant faith in the pure-mindedness of these aspirations,
without reverting to her origin, and also to recent rumours of her
father and Lady Grace Halley. As it was, he inquired of the cognizant,
whether an intellectual precocity, devoted by preference to questions
affecting the state of women, did not rather more than suggest the
existence of urgent senses likewise. She, a girl under twenty, had an
interest in public matters, and she called on a Mrs. Marsett. To plead
her simplicity, was to be absolutely ignorant of her.

He neighboured sagacity when he pointed that interrogation relating
to Nesta's precociousness of the intelligence. For, as they say in
dactylomancy, the 'psychical' of women are not disposed in their
sensitive early days to dwell upon the fortunes of their sex: a thought
or two turns them facing away, with the repugnant shiver. They worship
at a niche in the wall. They cannot avoid imputing some share of
foulness to them that are for scouring the chamber; and the civilized
male, keeping his own chamber locked, quite shares their pale taper's
view. The full-blooded to the finger-tips, on the other hand, are likely
to be drawn to the subject, by noble inducement as often as by base:
Nature at flood being the cause in either instance. This young Nature of
the good and the bad, is the blood which runs to power of heart as
well as to thirsts of the flesh. Then have men to sound themselves,
to discover how much of Nature their abstract honourable conception or
representative eidolon of young women will bear without going to pieces;
and it will not be much, unless they shall have taken instruction
from the poet's pen: for a view possibly of Nature at work to cast the
slough, when they see her writhing as in her ugliest old throes. If they
have learnt of Nature's priest to respect her, they will less distrust
those rare daughters of hers who are moved by her warmth to lift her
out of slime. It is by her own live warmth that it has to be done: cold
worship at a niche in the wall will not do it.--Well, there is an index,
for the enlargement of your charity.

But facts were Dudley's teachers. Physically, morally, mentally, he
read th