where the senses perpetually simmer when they are not boiling. The talk
at the Club recurred to him. How could Nesta have come to know the
woman? His questioning of the chapter of marvellous accidents, touched
Nesta simply, as a young girl to be protected, without abhorrently
involving the woman. He had his ideas of the Spirit of Woman stating her
case to the One Judge, for lack of an earthly just one: a story different
from that which is proclaimed pestilential by the body of censors under
conservatory glass; where flesh is delicately nurtured, highly prized;
spirit not so much so; and where the pretty tricking of the flesh is
taken for a spiritual ascendancy.

In spite of her turbulent breast's burden to deliver, Mrs. Marsett's
feminine acuteness was alive upon Dartrey, confirming here and there
Nesta's praises of him. She liked his build and easy carriage of a
muscular frame: her Ned was a heavy man. More than Dartrey's figure,
as she would have said, though the estimate came second, she liked his
manner with her. Not a doubt was there, that he read her position. She
could impose upon some: not upon masculine eyes like these. They did not
scrutinize, nor ruffle a smooth surface with a snap at petty impressions;
and they were not cynically intimate or dominating or tentatively
amorous: clear good fellowship was in them. And it was a blessedness
(whatever might be her feeling later, when she came to thank him at
heart) to be in the presence of a man whose appearance breathed of
offering her common ground, whereon to meet and speak together,
unburdened by the hunting world, and by the stoneing world. Such common
ground seems a kind of celestial to the better order of those excluded
from it.

Dartrey relieved her midway in a rigid practice of the formalities: 'I
think I may guess that you have something to tell me relating to Miss