One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
for the encounter with it, by lifting the veil, baring the world,
giving them knowledge to arm them for the fight they have
to sustain; and thereby preserve them further from the spiritual
collapse which follows the nursing of a false ideal of our
life in youth:—this being, Colney said, the prominent feminine
disease of the time, common to all our women; that is,
all having leisure to shine in the sun or wave in the wind as
flowers of the garden.
Whatever there was of wisdom in his view, he spoilt it for
English hearing, by making use of his dry compressed sentences.
Besides he was a bachelor; therefore but a theorist.
And his illustrations of his theory were grotesque; meditation
on them extracted a corrosive acid to consume, in horrid
derision, the sex, the nation, the race of man. The satirist
too devotedly loves his lash to be a persuasive teacher. Nataly
had excuses to cover her reasons for not listening to him.
One reason was, as she discerned through her confusion at
the thought, that the day drew near for her speaking fully to
Nesta; when, between what she then said and what she said
now, a cruel contrast might strike the girl and in toneing
revelations now, to be more consonant with them then;—in
softening and shading the edges of social misconduct, it
seemed painfully possible to be sowing in the girl’s mind
something like the reverse of moral precepts, even to smoothing
the way to a rebelliousness partly or wholly similar to her
own. But Nataly’s chief and her appeasing reason for pursuing
the conventional system with this exceptional young creature,
referred to the sentiments on that subject of the kind of
young man whom a mother elects from among those present
and eligible, as perhaps next to worthy to wed the girl, by
virtue of good promise in the moral department. She had Mr.
Dudley Sowerby under view; far from the man of her choice
and still the practice of decorum, discretion, a pardonable fastidiousness,
appears, if women may make any forecast of the
behaviour of young men or may trust the faces they see, to,
promise a future stability in the husband. Assuredly a Dudley
Sowerby would be immensely startled to find in his bride a
young woman more than babily aware of the existence of one
particular form of naughtiness on earth.
Victor was of no help: he had not an idea upon the right
education of the young of the sex. Repression and mystery,
he considered wholesome for girls; and he considered the
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