One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
set her mouth and fan at work to delineate total distinctions,
as it were from the egg to the empyrean. Her stature was
rather short, all of it conversational, at the eyebrows, the
shoulders, the finger-tips, the twisting shape; a ballerina’s
expressiveness; and her tongue dashed half sentences through
and among these hieroglyphs, loosely and funnily candid.
Anybody might hear that she had gone gambling into the
City, and that she had got herself into a mess, and that by
great good luck she had come across Victor Radnor, who,
with two turns of the wrist, had plucked her out of the mire,
the miraculous man! And she had vowed to him, never again
to run doing the like without his approval.
The cause of her having done it, was related with the accompaniments;
brows twitching, flitting smiles, shrugs,
pouts, shifts of posture: she was married to a centaur; out of
the saddle a man of wood, ‘an excellent man.’ For the not
colloquial do not commit themselves. But one wants a little
animation in a husband. She called on bell-motion of the
head to toll forth the utter nightcap negative. He had not
any: out of the saddle, he was asleep:—’next door to the Last
Trump,’ Colney Durance assisted her to describe the soundest
of sleep in a husband, after wooing her to unbosom herself.
She was awake to his guileful arts, and sailed along with
him, hailing his phrases, if he shot a good one; prankishly
exposing a flexible nature, that took its holiday thus in a
grinding world, among maskers, to the horrification of the
prim. So to refresh ourselves, by having publicly a hip-bath
in the truth while we shock our hearers enough to be discredited
for what we reveal, was a dexterous merry twist,
amusing to her; but it was less a cynical malice than her
nature that she indulged, ‘A woman must have some excitement.’
The most innocent appeared to her the Stock Exchange.
The opinions of husbands who are not summoned
to pay are hardly important; they vary.
Colney helped her now and then to step the trifle beyond
her stride, but if he was humorous, she forgave; and if together
they appalled the decorous, it was great gain. Her
supple person, pretty lips, the style she had, gave a pass to
the wondrous confidings, which were for masculine ears,
whatever the sex. Nataly might share in them, but women
did not lead her to expansiveness; or not the women of the
contracted class: Miss Graves, Mrs. Cormyn, and others at
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