ove could intoxicate like the cup of Circe,--whether a woman is ever
phosphorescent with the luminous vapor of life that she exhales,--these
and other questions which relate to occult influences exercised by
certain women we will not now discuss. It is enough that Mr. Bernard
was sensible of a strange fascination, not wholly new to him, nor
unprecedented in the history of human experience, but always a
revelation when it comes over us for the first or the hundredth time,
so pale is the most recent memory by the side of the passing moment with
the flush of any new-born passion on its cheek. Remember that Nature
makes every man love all women, and trusts the trivial matter of special
choice to the commonest accident.

If Mr. Bernard had had nothing to distract his attention, he might have
thought too much about his handsome partner, and then gone home and
dreamed about her, which is always dangerous, and waked up thinking of
her still, and then begun to be deeply interested in her studies, and so
on, through the whole syllogism which ends in Nature's supreme quod erat
demonstrandum. What was there to distract him or disturb him? He did not
know,--but there was something. This sumptuous creature, this Eve just
within the gate of an untried Paradise, untutored in the ways of the
world, but on tiptoe to reach the fruit of the tree of knowledge,--alive
to the moist vitality of that warm atmosphere palpitating with voices
and music, as the flower of some dioecious plant which has grown in a
lone corner and suddenly unfolding its corolla on some hot-breathing
June evening, feels that the air is perfumed with strange odors and
loaded with golden dust wafted from those other blossoms with which its
double life is shared,--this almost over-womanized woman might well have
bewitched him, but that he had a vague sense of a counter-charm. It was,
perhaps, only the same consciousness that some one was looking at him
which he himself had just given occasion to in his partner. Presently,
in one of the turns of the dance, he felt his eyes drawn to a figure he
had not distinctly recognized, though he had dimly felt its presence,
and saw that Elsie Venner was looking at him as if she saw nothing else
but him. He was not a nervous person, like the poor lady-teacher, yet
the glitter of the diamond eyes affected him strangely. It seemed to
disenchant the air, so full a moment before of strange attractions. He
became silent, and dreamy, as it we