and Football, Cricket, Rowing, and matches. He's immensely proud of
England in those things. And such muscle he has! though he begins to
fancy his heart's rather weak. It's digestion, I tell him. But he takes
me to the Opera sometimes--Italian Opera; he can't stand German. Down at
his place in Leicestershire, he tells me, when there 's company, he has--
I'm sure you sing beautifully. When I hear beautiful singing, even from
a woman they tell tales of, upon my word, it's true, I feel my sins all
melting out of me and I'm new-made: I can't bear Ned to speak. Would you
one day, one afternoon, before the end of next week?--it would do me such
real good, you can't guess how much; if I could persuade you! I know I'm
asking something out of rules. For just half an hour: I judge by your
voice in talking. Oh! it would do me good-good-good to hear you sing.
There is a tuned piano--a cottage; I don't think it sounds badly. You
would not see any great harm in calling on me? once!'

'No,' said Nesta. And it was her nature that projected the word. Her
awakened wits were travelling to her from a distance, and she had an
intimation of their tidings; and she could not have said what they were;
or why, for a moment, she hesitated to promise she would come. Her
vision of the reality of things was without written titles, to put
the stamp of the world on it. She felt this lady to be one encompassed
and in the hug of the elementary forces, which are the terrors to
inexperienced pure young women. But she looked at her, and dared trust
those lips, those eyes. She saw, through whatever might be the vessel,
the spirit of the woman; as the upper nobility of our brood are enabled
to do in a crisis mixed of moral aversion and sisterly sympathy, when
nature cries to them, and the scales of convention, the mud-spots of
accident, even naughtiness, even wickedness, all misfortune's issue, if
we but see the one look upward, fall away. Reason is not excluded from
these blind throbs of a blood that strikes to right the doings of the