One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
delivering its judgement upon her; and he sorrowfully acquiesced.
She passed from him.
When she was cut off, she sang him in the distance a remembered
saying of hers, with the full melody of her voice.
One day, treating of modern pessimism, he had draped a
cadaverous view of our mortal being in a quotation of the
wisdom of the Philosopher Emperor: ‘To set one’s love upon
the swallow is a futility.’ And she, weighing it, nodded, and
replied: ‘May not the pleasure for us remain if we set our
love upon the beauty of the swallow’s flight?’
There was, for a girl, a bit of idea, real idea, in that meaning,
of course, the picture we are to have of the bird’s wings in
motion, it has often been admired. Oh! not much of an idea
in itself: feminine and vague. But it was pertinent, opportune;
in this way she stimulated. And the girl who could think it,
and call on a Mrs. Marsett, was of the class of mixtures properly
to be handed over to chemical experts for analysis!
She had her aspirations on behalf of her sex: she and Mademoiselle
de Seilles discussed them; women were to do this,
do that:—necessarily a means of instructing a girl to learn
what they did do. If the lower part of her face had been as
reassuring to him as the upper, he might have put a reluctant
faith in the pure-mindedness of these aspirations, without
reverting to her origin, and also to recent rumours of her
father and Lady Grace Halley. As it was, he inquired of the
cognizant, whether an intellectual precocity, devoted by preference
to questions affecting the state of women, did not
rather more than suggest the existence of urgent senses likewise.
She, a girl under twenty, had an interest in public matters,
and she called on a Mrs. Marsett. To plead her simplicity,
was to be absolutely ignorant of her.
He neighboured sagacity when he pointed that interrogation
relating to Nesta’s precociousness of the intelligence. For,
as they say in dactylomancy, the ‘psychical’ of women are
not disposed in their sensitive early days to dwell upon the
fortunes of their sex: a thought or two turns them facing
away, with the repugnant shiver. They worship at a niche in
the wall. They cannot avoid imputing some share of foulness
to them that are for scouring the chamber; and the civilized
male, keeping his own chamber locked, quite shares
their pale taper’s view. The full-blooded to the finger-tips,
on the other hand, are likely to be drawn to the subject, by
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