ion to be cast on the unwedded.
Otherwise her mind was open; she was of aid to Victor in his confusion
over some lost Idea he had often touched on latterly. And she was the
one who sent him ahead at a trot under a light, by saying: 'You would
found a new and more stable aristocracy of the contempt of luxury' when
he talked of combatting the Jews with a superior weapon. That being,
in fact, as Colney Durance had pointed out to him, the weapon of
self-conquest used by them 'before they fell away to flesh-pottery.'
Was it his Idea? He fancied an aching at the back of his head when
he speculated. But his Idea had been surpassingly luminous, alive, a
creation; and this came before him with the yellow skin of a Theory,
bred, born of books. Though Nataly's mention of the aristocracy of
self-denying discipline struck a Lucifer in his darkness.

Nesta likewise helped: but more in what she did than in what she said:
she spoke intelligently enough to make him feel a certain increase of
alarm, amounting to a cursory secret acknowledgement of it, both at her
dealings with Dudley and with himself. She so quietly displaced the
lady visiting him at the City offices. His girl's disregard of
hostile weather, and her company, her talk, delighted him: still
he remonstrated, at her coming daily. She came: nor was there an
instigation on the part of her mother, clearly none: her mother asked
him once whether he thought she met the dreadful Brighton woman. His
Fredi drove constantly to walk back beside him Westward, as he loved
to do whenever it was practicable; and exceeding the flattery of his
possession of the gallant daughter, her conversation charmed him to
forget a disappointment caused by the defeat and entire exclusion of the
lady visiting him so complimentarily for his advice on stocks, shares,
mines, et caetera. The lady resisted; she was vanquished, as the shades
are displaced by simple apparition of daylight.

His Fredi was like the daylight to him; she was the very daylight to his
mind, whatsoever their theme of converse for by stimulating that ready
but vagrant mind to quit the leash of the powerful senses and be
a ethereally excursive, she gave him a new enjoyment; which led to
reflections--a sounding of Nature, almost a question to her, on the
verge of a doubt. Are we, in fact, harmonious with the Great Mother when
we yield to the pressure of our natures for indulgence? Is she, when
translated into us, solely the imperious ap