first when she was first a widow. She would keep talking to me of the
seductions of the metropolis--kept informing me I was a young man . . .
shaking her head. I 've told you. She--well, I know we are mixtures,
women as well as men. I can, I hope, grant the same--I believe I can--
allowances to women as to men; we are poor creatures, all of using one
sense: though I won't give Colney his footing; there's a better way of
reading us. I hold fast to Nature. No violation of Nature, my good
Colney! We can live the lives of noble creatures; and I say that
happiness was meant for us:--just as, when you sit down to your dinner,
you must do it cheerfully, and you make good blood: otherwise all's
wrong. There's the right answer to Colney! But when a woman like that
. . . . and marries a boy: well, twenty-one--not quite that: and an
innocent, a positive innocent--it may seem incredible, after a term of
school-life: it was a fact: I can hardly understand it myself when I look
back. Marries him! And then sets to work to persecute him, because he
has blood in his veins, because he worships beauty; because he seeks a
real marriage, a real mate. And, I say it! let the world take its own
view, the world is wrong! because he preferred a virtuous life to the
kind of life she would, she must--why, necessarily!--have driven him
to, with a mummy's grain of nature in his body. And I am made of flesh,
I admit it.'

'Victor, dearest, her threat concerns only your living at Lakelands.'

'Pray, don't speak excitedly, my love,' he replied to the woman whose
tones had been subdued to scarce more than waver. 'You see how I meet
it: water off a duck's back, or Indian solar beams on the skin of a
Hindoo! I despise it hardly worth contempt;--But, come: our day was a
good one. Fenellan worked well. Old Colney was Colney Durance, of
course. He did no real mischief.'