part to be long for this world might easily count as a positive
attraction. Such a man, proposing to please, persuade, secure her,
appropriate her for such a time, shorter or longer, as nature and the
doctors should allow, would make the best of her, ill, damaged,
disagreeable though she might be, for the sake of eventual benefits:
she being clearly a person of the sort esteemed likely to do the
handsome thing by a stricken and sorrowing husband.

She had said to herself betimes, in a general way, that whatever habits
her youth might form, that of seeing an interested suitor in every bush
should certainly never grow to be one of them--an attitude she had
early judged as ignoble, as poisonous. She had had accordingly in fact
as little to do with it as possible and she scarce knew why at the
present moment she should have had to catch herself in the act of
imputing an ugly motive. It didn't sit, the ugly motive, in Lord Mark's
cool English eyes; the darker side of it at any rate showed, to her
imagination, but briefly. Suspicion moreover, with this, simplified
itself: there was a beautiful reason--indeed there were two--why her
companion's motive shouldn't matter. One was that even should he desire
her without a penny she wouldn't marry him for the world; the other was
that she felt him, after all, perceptively, kindly, very pleasantly and
humanly, concerned for her. They were also two things, his wishing to
be well, to be very well, with her, and his beginning to feel her as
threatened, haunted, blighted; but they were melting together for him,
making him, by their combination, only the more sure that, as he
probably called it to himself, he liked her. That was presently what
remained with her--his really doing it; and with the natural and proper
incident of being conciliated by her weakness. Would she really have
had him--she could ask herself that--disconcerted or disgusted by it?
If he could only be touched enough to do what she preferred, not to
raise, not to press any question, he might render her a much better
service than by merely enabling her to refuse him. Again, again it was
strange, but he figured to her for the moment as the one safe
sympathiser. It would have made her worse to talk to others, but she
wasn't afraid with him of how he might wince and look pale. She would
keep him, that is, her one easy relation--in the sense of easy for
himself. Their actual outlook had meanwhile such charm, what surrounded
t