life at the consuming tragic core, round which the furnace pants. But
she was unreflecting, feeling only a beyond and hidden.

Besides, she was an exile. Spelling at dark things in the dark, getting
to have the sight which peruses darkness, she touched the door of a
mystery that denied her its key, but showed the lock; and her life was
beginning to know of hours that fretted her to recklessness. Her friend
Louise was absent: she had so few friends--owing to that unsolved reason:
she wanted one, of any kind, if only gentle: and this lady seemed to need
her: and she flattered; Nesta was in the mood for swallowing and
digesting and making sweet blood of flattery.

At one time, she liked Mrs. Marsett best absent: in musing on her,
wishing her well, having said the adieu. For it was wearisome to hear
praises of 'innocence'; and women can do so little to cure that
'wickedness of men,' among the lady's conversational themes; and 'love'
too: it may be a 'plague,' and it may be 'heaven': it is better left
unspoken of. But there were times when Mrs. Marsett's looks and tones
touched compassion to press her hand: an act that had a pledgeing
signification in the girl's bosom: and when, by the simple avoidance of
ejaculatory fervours, Mrs. Marsett's quieted good looks had a shadow of a
tender charm, more pathetic than her outcries were.

These had not always the sanction of polite usage: and her English was
guilty of sudden lapses to the Thameswater English of commerce and
drainage instead of the upper wells. But there are many uneducated
ladies in the land. Many, too, whose tastes in romantic literature
betray now and then by peeps a similarity to Nesta's maid Mary's. Mrs.
Marsett liked love, blood, and adventure. She had, moreover, a favourite
noble poet, and she begged Nesta's pardon for naming him, and she would