Beaufort "classed"
herself irretrievably.

No, it was worse a thousand times if, judging Beaufort, and probably
despising him, she was yet drawn to him by all that gave him an
advantage over the other men about her: his habit of two continents and
two societies, his familiar association with artists and actors and
people generally in the world's eye, and his careless contempt for
local prejudices. Beaufort was vulgar, he was uneducated, he was
purse-proud; but the circumstances of his life, and a certain native
shrewdness, made him better worth talking to than many men, morally and
socially his betters, whose horizon was bounded by the Battery and the
Central Park. How should any one coming from a wider world not feel
the difference and be attracted by it?

Madame Olenska, in a burst of irritation, had said to Archer that he
and she did not talk the same language; and the young man knew that in
some respects this was true. But Beaufort understood every turn of her
dialect, and spoke it fluently: his view of life, his tone, his
attitude, were merely a coarser reflection of those revealed in Count
Olenski's letter. This might seem to be to his disadvantage with Count
Olenski's wife; but Archer was too intelligent to think that a young
woman like Ellen Olenska would necessarily recoil from everything that
reminded her of her past. She might believe herself wholly in revolt
against it; but what had charmed her in it would still charm her, even
though it were against her will.

Thus, with a painful impartiality, did the young man make out the case
for Beaufort, and for Beaufort's victim. A longing to enlighten her
was strong in him; and there were moments when he imagined that all she
asked was to be enlightened.

That evening he unpacked his books from London. The box was full of
things he had been waiting for impatiently; a new volume of Herbert
Spencer, another collection of the prolific Alphonse Daudet's brilliant
tales, and a novel called "Middlemarch," as to which there had lately
been interesting things said in the reviews. He had declined three
dinner invitations in favour of this feast; but though he turned the
pages with the sensuous joy of the book-lover, he did not know what he
was reading, and one book after another dropped from his hand.
Suddenly, among them, he lit on a small volume of verse which he had
ordered because the name had attracted him: "The House of Life." He
took it up, and found hi