One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
violent as hysterical females to block them from the understanding.
His Robin Goodfellow instinct tried to be serviceable
at a crux of his meditations, where Edith Averst’s consumptive
brothers waved faded hands at her chances of inheriting
largely. Superb for the chances: but what of her offspring?
And the other was a girl such as the lusty Dame
Dowager of fighting ancestors would have signalled to the
heir of the House’s honours for the perpetuation of his race.
No doubt: and the venerable Dame (beautiful in her oldlace
frame, or say foliage) of the Ages backward, temp: Ed:
III. inflated him with a thought of her: and his readings in
modern books on heredity, pure blood, physical regeneration,
pronounced approval of Nesta Radnor: and thereupon
instinct opened mouth to speak; and a lockjaw seized it under
that scowl of his presiding mistrust of Nature.
He clung to his mistrust the more because of a warning he
had from the silenced natural voice: somewhat as we may
behold how the Conservatism of a Class, in a world of all the
evidences showing that there is no stay to things, comes of
the intuitive discernment of its finality. His mistrust was his
own; and Nesta was not; not yet; though a step would make
her his own. Instinct prompting to the step, was a worthless
adviser. It spurred him, nevertheless.
He called at the Club for his cousin Southweare, with whom
he was not in sympathy; and had information that,
Southweare said, ‘made the girl out all right.’ Girls in these
days do things which the sainted stay-at-homes preceding
them would not have dreamed of doing. Something had
occurred, relating to Major Worrell: he withdrew Miss
Radnor’s name, acknowledged himself mistaken or amended
his report of her, in some way, not quite intelligible. Dudley
was accosted by Simeon Fenellan; subsequently by Dartrey.
There was gossip over the latter gentleman’s having been up
before the magistrate, talk of a queer kind of stick, and
Dartrey said, laughing, to Simeon: ‘Rather lucky I bled the
rascal’;—whatever the meaning. She nursed one of her adorations
for this man, who had yesterday, apparently, joined
in a street-fray; so she partook of the stain of the turbid defacing
all these disorderly people.
At his hotel at breakfast the next morning, a newspaper furnished
an account of Captain Dartrey Fenellan’s participation
in the strife, after mention of him as nephew of the Earl of
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