she felt, as she said, that she
had lost perhaps her only true pupil; and more--perhaps her only true
master. For she saw clearly enough, that under that Silenus' mask was
hidden a nature capable of--perhaps more than she dare think of. She had
always felt him her superior in practical cunning; and that morning had
proved to her what she had long suspected, that he was possibly also her
superior in that moral earnestness and strength of will for which she
looked in vain among the enervated Greeks who surrounded her. And even
in those matters in which he professed himself her pupil, she had long
been alternately delighted by finding that he alone, of all her school,
seemed thoroughly and instinctively to comprehend her every word, and
chilled by the disagreeable suspicion that he was only playing with her,
and her mathematics and geometry, and meta-physic and dialectic, like
a fencer practising with foils, while he reserved his real strength for
some object more worthy of him. More than once some paradox or question
of his had shaken her neatest systems into a thousand cracks, and
opened up ugly depths of doubt, even on the most seemingly-palpable
certainties; or some half-jesting allusion to those Hebrew Scriptures,
the quantity and quality of his faith in which he would never confess,
made her indignant at the notion that he considered himself in
possession of a reserved ground of knowledge, deeper and surer than her
own, in which he did not deign to allow her to share.

And yet she was irresistibly attracted to him. That deliberate and
consistent luxury of his, from which she shrank, he had always boasted
that he was able to put on and take off at will like a garment: and now
he seemed to have proved his words; to be a worthy rival of the great
Stoics of old time. Could Zeno himself have asked more from frail
humanity? Moreover, Raphael had been of infinite practical use to
her. He worked out, unasked, her mathematical problems; he looked out
authorities, kept her pupils in order by his bitter tongue, and drew
fresh students to her lectures by the attractions of his wit, his
arguments, and last, but not least, his unrivalled cook and cellar.
Above all he acted the part of a fierce and valiant watch-dog on her
behalf, against the knots of clownish and often brutal sophists, the
wrecks of the old Cynic, Stoic, and Academic schools, who, with venom
increasing, after the wont of parties, with their decrepitude, assailed