One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
appeal to human sentiments—the feelings of a man of the
humbler orders, returning home in the evening, and his
thoughts upon things not without their importance, to find
repeatedly the guardian of his household beastly drunk, and
destructive.’ Colney made the case quite intelligible to the
magistrate; who gravely robed a strain of the idiomatic in
the officially awful, to keep in tune with his delinquent. No
serious harm had been done to the woman. Skepsey was admonished
and released. His wife expressed her willingness
to forgive him, now he had got his lesson; and she hoped he
would understand, that there was no need for a woman to
learn pugilism. Skepsey would have explained; but the case
was over, he was hustled out.
However, a keen young reporter present smelt fun for copy;
he followed the couple; and in a particular evening Journal,
laughable matter was printed concerning Skepsey’s view of
the pugilism to be imparted to women for their physicalprotection
in extremity, and the distinction of it from the
blow conveying the moral lesson to them; his wife having
objected to the former, because it annoyed her and he pestered
her; and she was never, she said, ready to stand up to
him for practice, as he called it, except when she had taken
more than he thought wholesome for her: he had no sense.
There was a squabble between them, because he chose to
scour away to his master’s office instead of conducting her
home with the honours. Nesta read the young reporter’s version,
with shrieks. She led the ladies of Moorsedge to discover
amusement in it.
At first, as her letter to her mother described them, they
were like a pair of pieces of costly China, with the settled
smile, and cold. She saw but the outside of them, and she
continued reporting the variations, which steadily determined
the warmth. On the night of the third day, they kissed her
tenderly; they were human figures.
No one could be aware of the trial undergone by the good
ladies in receiving her: Victor’s child; but, as their phrase
would have run, had they dared to give it utterance to one
another, a child of sin. How foreign to them, in that character,
how strange, when she was looked on as an inhabitant of
their house, they hardly dared to estimate; until the timorous
estimation, from gradually swelling, suddenly sank;
nature invaded them; they could discard the alienating sense
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