on of her. He lost altogether his
right judgement; even the cooler after-thoughts were lost. What sort of
man had Harry been, her first husband? A dashing soldier, a quarrelsome
duellist, a dull dog. But, dull to her? She, at least, was reverential
to the memory of him.

She lisped now and then of "my husband," very prettily, and with intense
provocation; and yet she worshipped brains. Evidently she thirsted
for that rare union of brains and bravery in a man, and would never
surrender till she had discovered it. Perhaps she fancied it did not
exist. It might be that she took Edward as the type of brains, and
Harry of bravery, and supposed that the two qualities were not to be had
actually in conjunction.

Her admiration of his (Edward's) wit, therefore, only strengthened the
idea she entertained of his deficiency in that other companion manly
virtue.

Edward must have been possessed, for he ground his teeth villanously in
supposing himself the victim of this outrageous suspicion. And how
to prove it false? How to prove it false in a civilized age, among
sober-living men and women, with whom the violent assertion of bravery
would certainly imperil his claim to brains? His head was like a
stew-pan over the fire, bubbling endlessly.

He railed at her to Algernon, and astonished the youth, who thought them
in a fair way to make an alliance. "Milk and capsicums," he called her,
and compared her to bloody mustard-haired Saxon Queens of history, and
was childishly spiteful. And Mrs. Lovell had it all reported to her, as
he was-quite aware.

"The woman seeking for an anomaly wants a master."

With this pompous aphorism, he finished his reading of the fair Enigma.

Words big in the mouth serve their turn when there is no way of
satisfying the intelligence.

To be her master, however, one must not begin by writhing as her slave.

The attempt to read an inscrutable woman allows her to dominate us too
commandingly. So the lordly mind takes her in a hard grasp, cracks the
shell, and drawing forth the kernel, says, "This was all the puzzle."

Doubtless it is the fate which women like Mrs. Lovell provoke. The truth
was, that she could read a character when it was under her eyes; but
its yesterday and to-morrow were a blank. She had no imaginative hold
on anything. For which reason she was always requiring tangible signs of
virtues that she esteemed.

The thirst for the shows of valour and wit was insane with her; but she