Otherwise her mind was open; she was of aid to Victor in his confusion
over some lost Idea he had often touched on latterly. And she was the
one who sent him ahead at a trot under a light, by saying: 'You would
found a new and more stable aristocracy of the contempt of luxury' when
he talked of combatting the Jews with a superior weapon. That being, in
fact, as Colney Durance had pointed out to him, the weapon of self-
conquest used by them 'before they fell away to flesh-pottery.' Was it
his Idea? He fancied an aching at the back of his head when he
speculated. But his Idea had been surpassingly luminous, alive, a
creation; and this came before him with the yellow skin of a Theory,
bred, born of books. Though Nataly's mention of the aristocracy of
self-denying discipline struck a Lucifer in his darkness.

Nesta likewise helped: but more in what she did than in what she said:
she spoke intelligently enough to make him feel a certain increase of
alarm, amounting to a cursory secret acknowledgement of it, both at her
dealings with Dudley and with himself. She so quietly displaced the lady
visiting him at the City offices. His girl's disregard of hostile
weather, and her company, her talk, delighted him: still he remonstrated,
at her coming daily. She came: nor was there an instigation on the part
of her mother, clearly none: her mother asked him once whether he thought
she met the dreadful Brighton woman. His Fredi drove constantly to walk
back beside him Westward, as he loved to do whenever it was practicable;
and exceeding the flattery of his possession of the gallant daughter, her
conversation charmed him to forget a disappointment caused by the defeat
and entire exclusion of the lady visiting him so complimentarily for his
advice on stocks, shares, mines, et caetera. The lady resisted; she was
vanquished, as the shades are displaced by simple apparition of daylight.

His Fredi was like the daylight to him; she was the very daylight to his