One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

A suggestion of her mother’s coming down, was faintly
spoken by one lady, echoed in a quaver by the other.
Nesta shook her head. To quiet the kind souls, she entreated
them to give their promise that they would invite her
again.
Imagining the Hon. Dudley to have cast her off, both ladies
embraced her: not entirely yielding-up their hearts to
her, by reason of the pernicious new ideas now in the world
to sap our foundations of morality; which warned them of
their duty to uphold mentally his quite justifiable behaviour,
even when compassionating the sufferings of the guiltless
creature loved by them.
George Meredith
CHAPTER XXXIV
CONTAINS DEEDS UNRELATED AND
EXPOSITIONS OF FEELINGS
ALL THROUGH THE AFTERNOON and evening Skepsey showed
indifference to meals by continuing absent: and he was the
one with whom Nesta would have felt at home; more at home
than with her parents. He and the cool world he moved in
were a transparency of peace to her mind; even to his giving of
some portion of it, when she had the dear little man present to
her in a vivid image of a fish in a glass globe, wandering round
and round, now and then shooting across, just as her Skepsey
did: he carried his head semihorizontally at his arrowy pace;
plain to read though he was, he appeared, under that image
created of him, animated by motives inducing to speculation.
She thought of him till she could have reproached him for
not returning and helping her to get away from the fever of
other thoughts:—this anguish twisting about her parents,
and the dreadful trammels of gratitude to a man afflictingly
generous, the frown of congregated people.
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