reat contempt. "As if
any pain he might feel, if he did feel any, would not be due and fitting
retribution upon him for the horrid life he has led, and the way he has
played fast and loose with women. He can go back to his Hindoos, whose
figures are so superior to any European's! But George is always so
absurd about his friends."

Whereon, being in an irritated and unkind mood, she desires the servant,
who just then announces the visit of the rector of the parish, to show
that reverend person into the small library, where she knows that Dulcia
Waverley is trying to get rid of her headache. It is very seldom that
she is unwise enough to indulge in this kind of domestic vengeance; but
at this moment it seems sweet to her.

The unfortunate and innocent rector finds the lord of Surrenden
monosyllabic and impolite, but Lady Waverley, woman-like, is wholly
equal to the occasion, and in her sweet low voice discourses of village
choirs, and village readings, and village medicines and morals, with
such divine patience and feminine adaptability that the good man
dismisses from his mind as impossible what he had certainly fancied he
saw in the moment when the library door opened before him.

If ever there was purity incarnate, Dulcia Waverley looks it, with her
white gown, her Madonna-like hair, her dewy pensive eyes, and her
appealing smile. She suggests the portraits in the Keepsakes and
Forget-me-Nots of fifty years ago; she has always about her the faint
old-fashioned perfume of attar of roses, and she wears her soft fair
hair in Raphaelite bands which in any other woman would look absurd; but
her experience has told her that, despite all change in modes and
manners, the surest weapons to subdue strong men are still those
old-fashioned charms of fragility and of apparent helplessness which
made Othello weep when his bridal moon was young above the Venetian
waters. Only if she had ever spoken candidly all she knows, which she
never by any chance does, she would say that to succeed thus with
Othello, or with any other male creature, you must be, under all your
apparent weakness, tenacious as a magnet and cold as steel. Therein lies
the secret of all power: the velvet glove and the iron hand may be an
old saying, but it is a truth never old.

The conclusion which she had drawn from Gervase and his fragmentary
story has seriously annoyed and shocked his cousin, but on reflection
she decides to adhere to her invariable rule of