One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
dilemma: her girl—Victor’s girl, as she had to think in this
instance,—the most cloudless of the young women of earth,
seemed, and might be figured as really, at the falling of a
crumb off the table of knowledge, taken by the brain to shoot
up to terrific heights of surveyal; and there she rocked; and
only her youthful healthiness brought her down to grass and
flowers. She had once or twice received the electrical stimulus,
to feel and be as lightning, from a seizure of facts in
infinitesimal doses, guesses caught off maternal evasions or
the circuitous explanation of matters touching sex in here and
there a newspaper, harder to repress completely than sewergas
in great cities: and her mother had seen, with an apprehensive
pang of anguish, how witheringly the scared young
intelligence of the innocent creature shocked her sensibility.
She foresaw the need to such a flameful soul, as bride, wife,
woman across the world, of the very princeliest of men in gifts
of strength, for her sustainer and guide. And the provident
mother knew this peerless gentleman: but he had his wife.
Delusions and the pain of the disillusioning were to be
feared for the imaginative Nesta; though not so much as that
on some future day of a perchance miserable yokemating—
a subjection or an entanglement—the nobler passions might
be summoned to rise for freedom, and strike a line to make
their logically estimable sequence from a source not
honourable before the public. Constantly it had to be
thought, that the girl was her father’s child.
At present she had no passions; and her bent to the happiness
she could so richly give, had drawn her sailing smoothly
over the harbour-bar of maidenhood; where many of her
sisters are disconcerted to the loss of simplicity. If Nataly
with her sleepless watchfulness and forecasts partook of the
French mother, Nesta’s Arcadian independence likened her
somewhat in manner to the Transatlantic version of the English
girl. Her high physical animation and the burden of
themes it plucked for delivery carried her flowing over impediments
of virginal self-consciousness, to set her at her
ease in the talk with men; she had not gone through the
various Nursery exercises in dissimulation; she had no appearance
of praying forgiveness of men for the original sin of
being woman; and no tricks of lips or lids, or traitor scarlet
on the cheeks, or assumptions of the frigid mask, or indicated
reserve-cajoleries. Neither ignorantly nor advisedly did
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