One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
tions our elders tell of! That masculine voice should herald a
new world to the maiden. The voice she had heard did but
rock to ruin the world she had been living in.
Mademoiselle prudently forbore from satirical remarks on
his person or on his conduct. Nesta had nothing to defend:
she walked in a bald waste.
‘Can I have been guilty of leading him to think …?’ she
said, in a tone that writhed, at a second discussion of this
hapless affair.
‘They choose to think,’ mademoiselle replied. ‘It is he or
another. My dear and dearest, you have entered the field
where shots fly thick, as they do to soldiers in battle; and it is
neither your fault nor any one’s, if you are hit.’
Nesta gazed at her, with a shy supplicating cry of ‘Louise.’
Mademoiselle immediately answered the tone of entreaty.
‘Has it happened to me? I am of the age of eight and twenty;
passable, to look at: yes, my dear, I have gone through it. To
spare you the questions tormenting you, I will tell you, that
perhaps our experience of our feelings comes nigh on a kind
of resemblance. The first gentleman who did me the honour
to inform me of his passion, was a hunchback.’
Nesta cried ‘Oh!’ in a veritable pang of sympathy, and
clapped hands to her ears, to shut out Mr. Barmby’s boom of
the terrific word attacking Louise from that deformed one.
Her disillusionment became of the sort which hears derision.
A girl of quick blood and active though unregulated
intellect, she caught at the comic of young women’s hopes
and experiences, in her fear of it.
‘My own precious poor dear Louise! what injustice there is
in the world for one like my Louise to have a hunchback to
be the first … !’
‘But, my dear, it did me no harm.’
‘But if it had been known!’
‘But it was known!’
Nesta controlled a shuddering: ‘It is the knowledge of it in
ourselves—that it has ever happened;—you dear Louise, who
deserve so much better! And one asks—Oh, why are we not
left in peace! And do look at the objects it makes of us!’
Mademoiselle: could see, that the girl’s desperation had got
hold of her humour for a life-buoy. ‘It is really worse to have
it unknown—when you are compelled to be his partner in
sharing the secret, and feel as if it were a dreadful doll you
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