senses--and however vividly--require enlightenment of the audible and
visible before their sterner feelings can be heated to break them away
from a blushful dread and force the mind to know. As much as the
wilfully or naturally blunted, the intelligently honest have to learn by
touch: only, their understandings cannot meanwhile be so wholly obtuse as
our society's matron, acting to please the tastes of the civilized man--
a creature that is not clean-washed of the Turk in him--barbarously
exacts. The signor aforesaid is puzzled to read the woman, who is after
all in his language; but when it comes to reading the maiden, she appears
as a phosphorescent hieroglyph to some speculative Egyptologer; and he
insists upon distinct lines and characters; no variations, if he is to
have sense of surety. Many a young girl is misread by the amount she
seems to know of our construction, history, and dealings, when it is not
more than her sincere ripeness of nature, that has gathered the facts of
life profuse about her, and prompts her through one or other of the
instincts, often vanity, to show them to be not entirely strange to her;
or haply her filly nature is having a fling at the social harness of
hypocrisy. If you (it is usually through the length of ears of your
Novelist that the privilege is yours) have overheard queer communications
passing between girls, and you must act the traitor eavesdropper or
Achilles masquerader to overhear so clearly, these, be assured, are not
specially the signs of their corruptness. Even the exceptionally cynical
are chiefly to be accused of bad manners. Your Moralist is a myopic
preacher, when he stamps infamy, on them, or on our later generation, for
the kick they have at grandmother decorum, because you do not or cannot
conceal from them the grinning skeleton behind it.

Nesta once had dreams of her being loved: and she was to love in return
for a love that excused her for loving double, treble; as not her lover
could love, she thought with grateful pride in the treasure she was to