The good ladies now, with some of their curiosity appeased, considerately
signified to him, that a young maiden was present.

The young maiden had in heart stuff to render such small gossip a hum of
summer midges. She did not imagine the dialogue concerned her in any
way. She noticed Mr. Stuart Rem's attentive scrutiny of her from time to
time. She had no sensitiveness, hardly a mind for things about her.
To-morrow she was to see Captain Dartrey. She dwelt on that prospect,
for an escape from the meshes of a painful hour--the most woeful of the
hours she had yet known-passed with Judith Marsett: which dragged her
soul through a weltering of the deeps, tossed her over and over, still
did it with her ideas. It shocked her nevertheless to perceive how much
of the world's flayed life and harsh anatomy she had apprehended, and so
coldly, previous to Mrs. Marsett's lift of the veil in her story of
herself: a skipping revelation, terrible enough to the girl; whose
comparison of the previously suspected things with the things now
revealed imposed the thought of her having been both a precocious and a
callous young woman: a kind of 'Delphica without the erudition,' her mind
phrased it airily over her chagrin.--And the silence of Dudley proved him
to have discovered his error in choosing such a person--he was wise, and
she thanked him. She had an envy of the ignorant-innocents adored by the
young man she cordially thanked for quitting her. She admired the white
coat of armour they wore, whether bestowed on them by their constitution
or by prudence. For while combating mankind now on Judith Marsett's
behalf, personally she ran like a hare from the mere breath of an
association with the very minor sort of similar charges; ardently she
desired the esteem of mankind; she was at moments abject. But had she
actually been aware of the facts now known?

Those wits of the virgin young, quickened to shrewdness by their budding