The ladies fancied, that Mr.Stuart Rem had hinted to them oddly of the girl; and that he might have meant, she appeared a little too cognizant of poor Mr.Abram Posterley's malady--as girls in these terrible days, only too frequently, too brazenly, are.

They discoursed to her of the degeneracy of the manners, nay, the morals of young Englishwomen, once patterns! They sketched the young English gentlewoman of their time; indeed a beauty; with round red cheeks, and rounded open eyes, and a demure shut mouth, a puppet's divine ignorance; inoffensive in the highest degree, rightly worshipped.

They were earnest, and Nesta struck at herself.

She wished to be as they had been, reserving her painful independence.
They were good: they were the ideal women of our country; which demands if it be but the semblance of the sureness of stationary excellence; such as we have in Sevres and Dresden, polished bright and smooth as ever by the morning's flick of a duster; perhaps in danger of accidents--accidents must be kept away; but enviable, admirable, we think, when we are not thinking of seed sown or help given to the generations to follow.

Nesta both envied and admired; she revered them; yet her sharp intelligence, larger in the extended boundary of thought coming of strange crimson-lighted new knowledge, discerned in a dimness what blest conditions had fixed them on their beautiful barren eminence.
Without challengeing it, she had a rebellious rush of sympathy for our evil-fortuned of the world; the creatures in the battle, the wounded, trodden, mud-stained: and it alarmed her lest she should be at heart one out of the fold.
She had the sympathy, nevertheless, and renewing and increasing with the pulsations of a compassion that she took for her reflective survey.