One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
Dartrey and Nesta, by the avowal of each of them to her, he
said, embracing her: ‘Your wisdom shall guide us, my love,’
and almost extinguished a vexation by concealing it.
She sighed: ‘If one could think, that a girl with Nesta’s revolutionary
ideas of the duties of women, and their powers, would
be safe—or at all rightly guided by a man who is both one of
the noblest and the wildest in the ideas he entertains!’
Victor sighed too. He saw the earldom, which was to dazzle
the gossips, crack on the sky in a futile rocket-bouquet.
She was distressed; she moaned: ‘My girl! my girl: I should
wish to leave her with one who is more fixed—the old-fashioned
husband. New ideas must come in politics, but in Society!—and
for women! And the young having heads, are
the most endangered. Nesta vows her life to it! Dartrey supports
her!’
‘See Colney,’ said Victor. ‘Odd, Colney does you good;
some queer way he has. Though you don’t care for his Rival
Tongues,—and the last number was funny, with Semhians
on the Pacific, impressively addressing a farewell to his cricketbat,
before he whirls it away to Neptune—and the blue hand
of his nation’s protecting God observed to seize it!—Dead
failure with the public, of course! However, he seems to seem
wise with you. The poor old fellow gets his trouncing from
the critics monthly. See Colney to-morrow, my love. Now
go to sleep. We have got over the worst. I speak at my Meeting
to-morrow and am a champagne-bottle of notes and
points for them.’
His lost Idea drew close to him in sleep: or he thought so,
when awaking to the conception of a people solidified, rich
and poor, by the common pride of simple manhood. But it
was not coloured, not a luminous globe: and the people were
in drab, not a shining army on the march to meet the Future.
It looked like a paragraph in a newspaper, upon which
a Leading Article sits, dutifully arousing the fat worm of sarcastic
humour under the ribs of cradled citizens, with an
exposure of its excellent folly. He would not have it laughed
at; still he could not admit it as more than a skirt of the robe
of his Idea. For let none think him a mere City merchant,
millionnaire, boon-fellow, or music-loving man of the world.
He had ideas to shoot across future Ages;—provide against
the shrinkage of our Coal-beds; against, and for, if you like,
the thickening, jumbling, threatening excess of population
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