ways directed against my anxiety as
teacher, while it sparkled over her enthusiasm as pupil; the harmless
expression of poor Mrs. Vesey's drowsy approval, which connected Miss
Fairlie and me as two model young people who never disturbed her--every
one of these trifles, and many more, combined to fold us together in
the same domestic atmosphere, and to lead us both insensibly to the
same hopeless end.

I should have remembered my position, and have put myself secretly on
my guard. I did so, but not till it was too late. All the discretion,
all the experience, which had availed me with other women, and secured
me against other temptations, failed me with her. It had been my
profession, for years past, to be in this close contact with young
girls of all ages, and of all orders of beauty. I had accepted the
position as part of my calling in life; I had trained myself to leave
all the sympathies natural to my age in my employer's outer hall, as
coolly as I left my umbrella there before I went upstairs. I had long
since learnt to understand, composedly and as a matter of course, that
my situation in life was considered a guarantee against any of my
female pupils feeling more than the most ordinary interest in me, and
that I was admitted among beautiful and captivating women much as a
harmless domestic animal is admitted among them. This guardian
experience I had gained early; this guardian experience had sternly and
strictly guided me straight along my own poor narrow path, without once
letting me stray aside, to the right hand or to the left. And now I
and my trusty talisman were parted for the first time. Yes, my
hardly-earned self-control was as completely lost to me as if I had
never possessed it; lost to me, as it is lost every day to other men,
in other critical situations, where women are concerned. I know, now,
that I should have questioned myself from the first. I should have
asked why any room in the house was better than home to me when she
entered it, and barren as a desert when she went out again--why I
always noticed and remembered the little changes in her dress that I
had noticed and remembered in no other woman's before--why I saw her,
heard her, and touched her (when we shook hands at night and morning)
as I had never seen, heard, and touched any other woman in my life? I
should have looked into my own heart, and found this new growth
springing up there, and plucked it out while it was young. Why