ck of a human being!

If any gentleman will have the kindness to stop this run-away
comparison, I shall be much obliged to him. All I intended to say was,
that we need not wait for hearts to break out in flames to know that
they are full of combustibles and that a spark has got among them. I
don't pretend to say or know what it is that brings these two persons
together;--and when I say together, I only mean that there is an
evident affinity of some kind or other which makes their commonest
intercourse strangely significant, so that each seems to understand a
look or a word of the other. When the young girl laid her hand on the
little gentleman's arm,--which so greatly shocked the Model, you may
remember,--I saw that she had learned the lion-tamer's secret. She
masters him, and yet I can see she has a kind of awe of him, as the man
who goes into the cage has of the monster that he makes a baby of.

One of two things must happen. The first, is love, downright love, on
the part of this young girl, for the poor little misshapen man. You may
laugh, if you like. But women are apt to love the men who they think
have the largest capacity of loving;--and who can love like one that has
thirsted all his life long for the smile of youth and beauty, and seen
it fly his presence as the wave ebbed from the parched lips of him
whose fabled punishment is the perpetual type of human longing and
disappointment? What would become of _him_, if this fresh soul should
stoop upon him in her first young passion, as the flamingo drops out of
the sky upon some lonely and dark lagoon in the marshes of Cagliari,
with a flutter of scarlet feathers and a kindling of strange fires
in the shadowy waters that hold her burning image in their trembling
depths?

--Marry her, of course?--Why, no, not _of course_. I should think the
chance less, on the whole, that he would be willing to marry her than
she to marry him.

There is one other thing that might happen. If the interest he awakes in
her gets to be a deep one, and yet has nothing of love in it, she will
glance off from him into some great passion or other. All excitements
run to love in women of a certain--let us not say age, but youth. An
electrical current passing through a coil of wire makes a magnet of a
bar of iron lying within it, but not touching it. So a woman is turned
into a love-magnet by a tingling current of life running round her. I
should like to see one of them balanced on a pivot