One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
CHAPTER XXXII
SHOWS HOW TEMPER MAY KINDLE
TEMPER AND AN INDIGNANT WOMAN
GET HER WEAPON
JUDITH MARSETT stood in her room to receive Nesta’s hero.
She was flushed, and had thinned her lips for utterance of a
desperate thing, after the first severe formalities.
Her aim was to preserve an impressive decorum. She was
at the same time burning to speak out furious wrath, in words
of savage rawness, if they should come, as a manner of slapping
the world’s cheek for the state to which it reduces its
women; whom one of the superior creatures can insult, and
laugh.
Men complaining of the ‘peace which is near their extinction,’
have but to shuffle with the sex; they will experience as
remarkable a change as if they had passed off land on to sea.
Dartrey had some flitting notion of the untamed original
elements women can bring about us, in his short observant
bow to Mrs. Marsett, following so closely upon the scene
with Mrs. Blathenoy.
But this handsome woman’s look of the dull red line of a
sombre fire, that needed only stir of a breath to shoot the blaze,
did not at all alarm him. He felt refreshingly strung by it.
She was discerned at a glance to be an aristocratic member
of regions where the senses perpetually simmer when they
are not boiling. The talk at the Club recurred to him. How
could Nesta have come to know the woman? His questioning
of the chapter of marvellous accidents, touched Nesta
simply, as a young girl to be protected, without abhorrently
involving the woman. He had his ideas of the Spirit of
Woman stating her case to the One Judge, for lack of an
earthly just one: a story different from that which is proclaimed
pestilential by the body of censors under conservatory
glass; where flesh is delicately nurtured, highly prized;
spirit not so much so; and where the pretty tricking of the
flesh is taken for a spiritual ascendancy.
In spite of her turbulent breast’s burden to deliver, Mrs.
Marsett’s feminine acuteness was alive upon Dartrey, confirming
here and there Nesta’s praises of him. She liked his
build and easy carriage of a muscular frame: her Ned was a
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