importunities, her whole
presence seemed to him to exhale a singularly potent sweetness. He had
told her that she was an enchantress, and this assertion, too, had its
measure of truth. But her spell was a steady one; it sprang not from her
beauty, her wit, her figure,--it sprang from her character. When she
found herself aroused to appeal or to resistance, Richard's pulses were
quickened to what he had called intoxication, not by her smiles, her
gestures, her glances, or any accession of that material beauty which
she did not possess, but by a generous sense of her virtues in action.
In other words, Gertrude exercised the magnificent power of making her
lover forget her face. Agreeably to this fact, his habitual feeling in
her presence was one of deep repose,--a sensation not unlike that which
in the early afternoon, as he lounged in his orchard with a pipe, he
derived from the sight of the hot and vaporous hills. He was innocent,
then, of that delicious trouble which Gertrude's thoughts had touched
upon as a not unnatural result of her visit, and which another woman's
fancy would perhaps have dwelt upon as an indispensable proof of its
success. "Porphyro grew faint," the poet assures us, as he stood in
Madeline's chamber on Saint Agnes' eve. But Richard did not in the least
grow faint now that his mistress was actually filling his musty old room
with her voice, her touch, her looks; that she was sitting in his
unfrequented chairs, trailing her skirt over his faded carpet, casting
her perverted image upon his mirror, and breaking his daily bread. He
was not fluttered when he sat at her well-served table, and trod her
muffled floors. Why, then, should he be fluttered now? Gertrude was
herself in all places, and (once granted that she was at peace) to be
at her side was to drink peace as fully in one place as in another.

Richard accordingly ate a great working-day dinner in Gertrude's
despite, and she ate a small one for his sake. She asked questions
moreover, and offered counsel with most sisterly freedom. She deplored
the rents in his table-cloth, and the dismemberments of his furniture;
and although by no means absurdly fastidious in the matter of household
elegance, she could not but think that Richard would be a happier and a
better man if he were a little more comfortable. She forbore, however,
to criticise the poverty of his _entourage_, for she felt that the
obvious answer was, that such a state of things was the