One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
Mr. Stuart Rem had hinted to them oddly of the girl; and
that he might have meant, she appeared a little too cognizant
of poor Mr. Abram Posterley’s malady—as girls in these
terrible days, only too frequently, too brazenly, are. They discoursed
to her of the degeneracy of the manners, nay, the
morals of young Englishwomen, once patterns! They sketched
the young English gentlewoman of their time; indeed a
beauty; with round red cheeks, and rounded open eyes, and
a demure shut mouth, a puppet’s divine ignorance; inoffensive
in the highest degree, rightly worshipped. They were
earnest, and Nesta struck at herself. She wished to be as they
had been, reserving her painful independence.
They were good: they were the ideal women of our country;
which demands if it be but the semblance of the sureness
of stationary excellence; such as we have in Sevres and
Dresden, polished bright and smooth as ever by the morning’s
flick of a duster; perhaps in danger of accidents—accidents
must be kept away; but enviable, admirable, we think, when
we are not thinking of seed sown or help given to the generations
to follow. Nesta both envied and admired; she revered
them; yet her sharp intelligence, larger in the extended
boundary of thought coming of strange crimson-lighted new
knowledge, discerned in a dimness what blest conditions had
fixed them on their beautiful barren eminence. Without
challengeing it, she had a rebellious rush of sympathy for
our evil-fortuned of the world; the creatures in the battle,
the wounded, trodden, mud-stained: and it alarmed her lest
she should be at heart one out of the fold.
She had the sympathy, nevertheless, and renewing and increasing
with the pulsations of a compassion that she took
for her reflective survey. The next time she saw Dartrey
Fenellan, she was assured of him, as being the man who might
be spoken to; and by a woman: though not by a girl; not
spoken to by her. The throb of the impulse precipitating
speech subsided to a dumb yearning. He noticed her look:
he was unaware of the human sun in the girl’s eyes taking an
image of him for permanent habitation in her breast. That
face of his, so clearly lined, quick, firm, with the blue smile
on it like the gleam of a sword coming out of sheath, did not
mean hardness, she could have vowed. O that some woman,
other than the unhappy woman herself, would speak the
words denied to a girl! He was the man who would hearken
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