One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
are not specially the signs of their corruptness. Even the exceptionally
cynical are chiefly to be accused of bad manners.
Your Moralist is a myopic preacher, when he stamps infamy,
on them, or on our later generation, for the kick they have at
grandmother decorum, because you do not or cannot conceal
from them the grinning skeleton behind it.
Nesta once had dreams of her being loved: and she was to
love in return for a love that excused her for loving double,
treble; as not her lover could love, she thought with grateful
pride in the treasure she was to pour out at his feet; as only
one or two (and they were women) in the world had ever
loved. Her notion of the passion was parasitic: man the tree,
woman the bine: but the bine was flame to enwind and to
soar, serpent to defend, immortal flowers to crown. The
choice her parents had made for her in Dudley, behind the
mystery she had scent of, nipped her dream, and prepared
her to meet, as it were, the fireside of a November day instead
of springing up and into the dawn’s blue of full summer
with swallows on wing. Her station in exile at the Wells
of the weariful rich, under the weight of the sullen secret,
unenlivened by Dudley’s courtship, subdued her to the
world’s decrees; phrased thus: ‘I am not to be a heroine.’ The
one golden edge to the view was, that she would greatly please
her father.
Her dream of a love was put away like a botanist’s pressed
weed. But after hearing Judith Marsett’s wild sobs, it had no
place in her cherishing. For, above all, the unhappy woman
protested love to have been the cause of her misery. She
moaned of ‘her Ned’; of his goodness, his deceitfulness, her
trustfulness; his pride and the vileness of his friends; her
longsuffering and her break down of patience. It was done
for the proof of her unworthiness of Nesta’s friendship: that
she might be renounced, and embraced. She told the pathetic
half of her story, to suit the gentle ear, whose critical
keenness was lost in compassion. How deep the compassion,
mixed with the girl’s native respect for the evil-fortuned,
may be judged by her inaccessibility to a vulgar tang that she
was aware of in the deluge of the torrent, where Innocence
and Ned and Love and a proud Family and that beast Worrell
rolled together in leaping and shifting involutions.
A darkness of thunder was on the girl. Although she was
not one to shrink beneath it like the small bird of the woods,
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