One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
she hesitated to promise she would come. Her vision of the
reality of things was without written titles, to put the stamp
of the world on it. She felt this lady to be one encompassed
and in the hug of the elementary forces, which are the terrors
to inexperienced pure young women. But she looked at
her, and dared trust those lips, those eyes. She saw, through
whatever might be the vessel, the spirit of the woman; as the
upper nobility of our brood are enabled to do in a crisis mixed
of moral aversion and sisterly sympathy, when nature cries
to them, and the scales of convention, the mud-spots of accident,
even naughtiness, even wickedness, all misfortune’s
issue, if we but see the one look upward, fall away. Reason is
not excluded from these blind throbs of a blood that strikes
to right the doings of the Fates. Nesta did not err in her
divination of the good and the bad incarnate beside her,
though both good and bad were behind a curtain; the latter
sparing her delicate senses, appealing to chivalry, to the simply
feminine claim on her. Reason, acting in her heart as a
tongue of the flames of the forge where we all are wrought,
told her surely that the good predominated. She had the heart
which is at our primal fires when nature speaks.
She gave the promise to call on Mrs. Marsett and sing to
her.
‘An afternoon? Oh! what afternoon?’ she was asked, and
she said: ‘This afternoon, if you like.’
So it was agreed: Mrs. Marsett acted violently the thrill of
delight she felt in the prospect.
The ladies Dorothea and Virginia, consulted, and pronounced
the name of Marsett to be a reputable County name.
‘There was a Leicestershire baronet of the name of Marsett.’
They arranged to send their button-blazing boy at Nesta’s
heels. Mrs. Marsett resided in a side-street not very distant
from the featureless but washed and orderly terrace of the
glassy stare at sea.
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