and glance like steel, and who have surmounted all that belongs to sex, except a keen dramatic interest in its problems, did not talk of these matters after their kind, as in all the ages. But the girls were not told, they did not know, they shrank from information which they would not have understood had it been conveyed to them, except, indeed, a few principles that were broad and general: that to marry a girl to an old man or a wicked man was a hideous thing, and that the old doctrine of a reformed rake, which had been preached to their mothers, was a scorn to womankind, and no longer to be suggested to them. For the magic of the Pamelas was over, and Sir Walter had arisen in the sky, which cleared before him, all noisome things flying where he made his honest, noble way. Not much these heroes of his, people say, not worth a Tom Jones with his stress and storm of life; but bringing in a new era, the young and pure with the young and true, and not a whitewashed Lovelace in the whole collection. Lily was of Scott’s age; and when she saw this wolf approaching the lamb, or rather this black sheep, as every-body called him, demanding a maiden sacrifice to clean him from his guilt, her heart burned with indignation and the rage of innocence. She could not understand Helen’s strange acquiescence, nor her sense of possible guilt in not having accepted that part which was offered to her. The very atmosphere which surrounded Duff was obnoxious to Lily: the roughness of his tones and his clothes, his large, noisy movements and vehemence and gestures. He had lost, she thought, that air of a gentleman which is the last thing a man loses who is born to it, and never, as she believed, loses innocently.