Her handwriting was good, as good as the writing of the most agreeable
lady on earth. Dudley did not blame her for letting the lady be deceived
in her--if she knew her position. She might be ignorant of it. And to
strangers, to chance acquaintances, even to friends, the position, of the
loathsome name, was not materially important. Marriage altered the view.
He sided with his family.

He sided, edgeing away, against his family. But a vision of the earldom
coming to him, stirred reverential objections, composed of all which his
unstained family could protest in religion, to repudiate an alliance with
a stained house, and the guilty of a condonation of immorality. Who
would have imagined Mr. Radnor a private sinner flaunting for one of the
righteous? And she, the mother, a lady--quite a lady; having really a
sense of duty, sense of honour! That she must be a lady, Dudley was
convinced. He beheld through a porous crape, woven of formal
respectfulness, with threads of personal disgust, the scene, striking him
drearly like a distant great mansion's conflagration across moorland at
midnight, of a lady's breach of bonds and plunge of all for love. How
had it been concealed? In Dudley's upper sphere, everything was exposed:
Scandal walked naked and unashamed-figurante of the polite world. But
still this lady was of the mint and coin, a true lady. Handsome now, she
must have been beautiful. And a comprehensible pride (for so would
Dudley have borne it) keeps the forsaken man silent up to death: . . .
grandly silent; but the loss of such a woman is enough to kill a man!
Not in time, though! Legitimacy evidently, by the mother's confession,
cannot protect where it is wanted. Dudley was optically affected by a
round spot of the world swinging its shadow over Nesta.

He pitied, and strove to be sensible of her. The effort succeeded so