is very much more,
and which affects us at times so much less than did the pressure of a
soft wedded hand by our own elsewhere pledged one. On the contrary, we
triumph, we have the rich flavour of the fruit for our pains; we
commission the historian to write in hieroglyphs a round big fact.

The lady passed through the trial submitting, stiffening her shoulders,
and at the close, shutting her eyes. She stood cool in her blush, and
eyed him, like one gravely awakened. Having been embraced and kissed, she
had to consider her taste for the man, and acknowledge a neatness of
impetuosity in the deed; and he was neither apologizing culprit nor
glorying-bandit when it was done, but something of the lyric God
tempering his fervours to a pleased sereneness, not offering a renewal of
them. He glowed transparently. He said: 'You are the woman to take a
front place in the battle!' With this woman beside him, it was a
conquered world.

Comparisons, in the jotting souvenirs of a woman of her class and set,
favoured him; for she disliked enterprising libertines and despised
stumbling youths; and the genial simple glow of his look assured her,
that the vanished fiery moment would not be built on by a dating master.
She owned herself. Or did she? Some understanding of how the other woman
had been won to the leap with him, was drawing in about her. She would
have liked to beg for the story; and she could as little do that as bring
her tongue to reproach. If we come to the den! she said to her thought of
reproach. Our semi-civilization makes it a den, where a scent in his
nostrils will spring the half-tamed animal away to wildness. And she had
come unanticipatingly, without design, except perhaps to get a superior
being to direct and restrain a gambler's hand perhaps for the fee of a
temporary pressure.

'I may be able to help a little--I hope!' she fetched a breath to say,
while her eyelids mildly sermonized; and immediately she talked of her
inheritance of property in stocks and shares.

Victor commented passingly on the soundness of them, and talked of
projects he entertained:--Parliament! 'But I have only to mention it at
home, and my poor girl will set in for shrinking.'

He doated on the diverse aspect of the gallant woman of the world.

'You succeed in everything you do,' said she, and she cordially believed
it; and that belief set the neighbour memory palpitating. Success folded
her waist, was warm upon her lips: she worshi