One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
Posterley’s malady. He had not an income to support a wife.
Always was this unfortunate gentleman entangling himself
in a passion for maid or widow of the Wells and it was desperate,
a fever. Mr. Stuart Rem charitably remarked on his
taking it so severely because of his very scrupulous good conduct.
They pardoned a little wound to their delicacy, and
asked: ‘On this occasion?’ Mr. Stuart Rem named a
linendraper’s establishment near the pantiles, where a fair
young woman served. ‘And her reputation?’ That was an article
less presentable through plate-glass, it seemed: Mr. Stuart
Rem drew a prolonged breath into his nose.
‘It is most melancholy!’ they said in unison. ‘Nothing positive,’
said he. ‘But the suspicion of a shadow, Mr. Stuart Rem!
You will not permit it?’ He stated, that his friend Buttermore
might have influence. Dorothea said: ‘When I think of Mr.
Posterley’s addiction to ceremonial observances, and to matrimony,
I cannot but think of a sentence that fell from Mr.
Durance one day, with reference to that division of our
Church: he called it:—you frown! and I would only quote
Mr. Durance to you in support of your purer form, as we
hold it to be—with the candles, the vestments, Confession,
alas! he called it, “Rome and a wife.”’
Mr. Stuart Rem nodded an enforced assent: he testily dismissed
mention of Mr. Durance, and resumed on Mr.
Posterley.
The good ladies now, with some of their curiosity appeased,
considerately signified to him, that a young maiden was
present.
The young maiden had in heart stuff to render such small
gossip a hum of summer midges. She did not imagine the
dialogue concerned her in any way. She noticed Mr. Stuart
Rem’s attentive scrutiny of her from time to time. She had
no sensitiveness, hardly a mind for things about her. Tomorrow
she was to see Captain Dartrey. She dwelt on that
prospect, for an escape from the meshes of a painful hour—
the most woeful of the hours she had yet known-passed with
Judith Marsett: which dragged her soul through a weltering
of the deeps, tossed her over and over, still did it with her
ideas. It shocked her nevertheless to perceive how much of
the world’s flayed life and harsh anatomy she had apprehended,
and so coldly, previous to Mrs. Marsett’s lift of the
veil in her story of herself: a skipping revelation, terrible
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