Authority, when we see it upholding Mrs. Burman to crush a woman like
Nataly!

Victor's novel exercises in reflection were bringing him by hard degrees
to conceive it to be the impalpable which has prevailing weight. Not
many of our conquerors have scored their victories on the road of that
index: nor has duration been granted them to behold the minute measure of
value left even tangible after the dust of the conquest subsides. The
passing by a shop where a broken old woman might be supposed to sit
beneath her green forehead-shade--Venetian-blind of a henbane-visage!--
had precipitated him into his first real grasp of the abstract verity:
and it opens on to new realms, which are a new world to the practical
mind. But he made no advance. He stopped in a fever of sensibility,
to contemplate the powerful formless vapour rolling from a source that
was nothing other than yonder weak lonely woman.

In other words, the human nature of the man was dragged to the school of
its truancy by circumstances, for him to learn the commonest of sums done
on a slate, in regard to payment of debts and the unrelaxing grip of the
creditor on the defaulter. Debtors are always paying like those who are
guilty of the easiest thing in life, the violation of Truth, they have
made themselves bondmen to pay, if not in substance, then in soul; and
the nipping of the soul goes on for as long as the concrete burden is
undischarged. You know the Liar; you must have seen him diminishing,
until he has become a face without features, withdrawn to humanity's
preliminary sketch (some half-dozen frayed threads of woeful outline on
our original tapestry-web); and he who did the easiest of things, he must
from such time sweat in being the prodigy of inventive nimbleness, up to
the day when he propitiates Truth by telling it again. There is a
repentance that does reconstitute! It may help to the traceing to