love pleasure, love
flattery, love their beauty: they cannot love a man. Or the love is a
ship that will not sail a sea.

Now, if the fact were declared and attested, if her shallowness were
seen proved, one might get free of the devil she plants in the breast.
Absolutely to despise her would be release, and it would allow of his
tasting Carinthia's charm, reluctantly acknowledged; not 'money of the
country' beside that golden Henrietta's.

Yet who can say?--women are such deceptions. Often their fairest,
apparently sweetest, when brought to the keenest of the tests, are
graceless; or worse, artificially consonant; in either instance barren
of the poetic. Thousands of the confidently expectant among men have
been unbewitched; a lamentable process; and the grimly reticent and
the loudly discursive are equally eloquent of the pretty general
disillusion. How they loathe and tear the mask of the sham attraction
that snatched them to the hag yoke, and fell away to show its grisly
horrors within the round of the month, if not the second enumeration of
twelve by the clock! Fleetwood had heard certain candid seniors talk,
delivering their minds in superior appreciation of unpretentious boor
wenches, nature's products, not esteemed by him. Well, of a truth,
she--'Red Hair and Rugged Brows,' as the fellow Woodseer had called her,
in alternation with 'Mountain Face to Sun'--she at the unveiling was
gentle, surpassingly; graceful in the furnace of the trial. She wore
through the critic ordeal his burning sensitiveness to grace and
delicacy cast about a woman, and was rather better than not withered by
it.

On the borders between maidenly and wifely, she, a thing of flesh like
other daughters of earth, had impressed her sceptical lord, inclining
to contempt of her and detestation of his bargain, as a flitting hue,
ethereal, a transfiguration of earthliness in the core of the earthly
furnace. And how?--but that it must have been the naked shining forth
of her character, startled to show itself:--'It is my husband':--it must
have been love.

The love that they versify, and strum on guitars, and go crazy over, and
end by roaring at as the delusion; this common bloom of the ripeness of
a season; this would never have utterly captured a sceptic, to vanquish
him in his mastery, snare him in her surrender. It must have been the
veritable passion: a flame kept alive by vestal ministrants in the
yewwood of the forest of Old Romance; pla