audience; concluding: 'So there's an end of Divorce.'

'By the trick of multiplication,' Fenellan, now reassured, was content to
say. And that did not extinguish the cracker of a theme; handled very
carefully, as a thing of fire, it need scarce be remarked, three young
women being present.

Nataly had eyes on her girl, and was pleased at an alertness shown by Mr.
Sowerby to second her by crossing the dialogue. As regarded her personal
feelings, she was hardened, so long as the curtains were about her to
keep the world from bending black brows of inquisition upon one of its
culprits. But her anxiety was vigilant to guard her girl from an
infusion of any of the dread facts of life not coming through the
mother's lips: and she was a woman having the feminine mind's pudency
in that direction, which does not consent to the revealing of much.
Here was the mother's dilemma: her girl--Victor's girl, as she had to
think in this instance,--the most cloudless of the young women of earth,
seemed, and might be figured as really, at the falling of a crumb off the
table of knowledge, taken by the brain to shoot up to terrific heights of
surveyal; and there she rocked; and only her youthful healthiness brought
her down to grass and flowers. She had once or twice received the
electrical stimulus, to feel and be as lightning, from a seizure of facts
in infinitesimal doses, guesses caught off maternal evasions or the
circuitous explanation of matters touching sex in here and there a
newspaper, harder to repress completely than sewer-gas in great cities:
and her mother had seen, with an apprehensive pang of anguish, how
witheringly the scared young intelligence of the innocent creature
shocked her sensibility. She foresaw the need to such a flameful soul,
as bride, wife, woman across the world, of the very princeliest of men in
gifts of strength, for her sustainer and guide. And the provident mother