One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
CHAPTER VIII
pleasant dingle. Such is the comfort of it, that we can dream,
and lull our fears, and half think what we wish: and it is a
SOME FAMILIAR GUESTS
heavenly truce with the fretful mind divided from our wishes.
Nesta wondered at her mother’s complacent questions concerning
this Lakelands: the house, the county, the kind of
NESTA READ her mother’s face when Mrs. Victor entered the
drawing-room to receive the guests. She saw a smooth fair people about, the features of the country. Physically unable
surface, of the kind as much required by her father’s eyes as herself to be regretful under a burden three parts enrapturing
her, the girl expected her mother to display a shadowy
innocuous air by his nostrils: and it was honest skin, not the
deceptive feminine veiling, to make a dear man happy over vexation, with a proud word or two, that would summon
his volcano. Mrs. Victor was to meet the friends with whom her thrilling sympathy in regard to the fourth part: namely,
her feelings were at home, among whom her musical gifts the aristocratic iciness of country magnates, who took them
gave her station: they liked her for herself; they helped her to up and cast them off; as they had done, she thought, at Craye
feel at home with herself and be herself: a rarer condition Farm and at Creckholt: she remembered it, of the latter place,
with us all than is generally supposed. So she could determine
to be cheerful in the anticipation of an evening that been expelled from by her pride of the frosty surrounding
wincingly, insurgently, having loved the dear home she had
would at least be restful to the outworn sentinel nerve of her people—or no, not all, but some of them. And what had
heart, which was perpetually alert and signalling to the great roused their pride?
organ; often colouring the shows and seems of adverse things Striking for a reason, her inexperience of our modern England,
supplemented by readings in the England of a pre-
for an apeing of reality with too cruel a resemblance. One of
the scraps of practical wisdom gained by hardened sufferers ceding generation, had hit on her father’s profession of merchant.
It accounted to her for the behaviour of the is, to keep from spying at horizons when they drop into a
haughty
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