used to evaporate harmlessly in the freedom of her
former life. It is quite possible that I may be altogether wrong in
this idea. My own impression, however, is, that I am right. Time will
show.

And the magician who has wrought this wonderful transformation--the
foreign husband who has tamed this once wayward English woman till her
own relations hardly know her again--the Count himself? What of the
Count?

This in two words: He looks like a man who could tame anything. If he
had married a tigress, instead of a woman, he would have tamed the
tigress. If he had married me, I should have made his cigarettes, as
his wife does--I should have held my tongue when he looked at me, as
she holds hers.

I am almost afraid to confess it, even to these secret pages. The man
has interested me, has attracted me, has forced me to like him. In two
short days he has made his way straight into my favourable estimation,
and how he has worked the miracle is more than I can tell.

It absolutely startles me, now he is in my mind, to find how plainly I
see him!--how much more plainly than I see Sir Percival, or Mr.
Fairlie, or Walter Hartright, or any other absent person of whom I
think, with the one exception of Laura herself! I can hear his voice,
as if he was speaking at this moment. I know what his conversation was
yesterday, as well as if I was hearing it now. How am I to describe
him? There are peculiarities in his personal appearance, his habits,
and his amusements, which I should blame in the boldest terms, or
ridicule in the most merciless manner, if I had seen them in another
man. What is it that makes me unable to blame them, or to ridicule
them in HIM?

For example, he is immensely fat. Before this time I have always
especially disliked corpulent humanity. I have always maintained that
the popular notion of connecting excessive grossness of size and
excessive good-humour as inseparable allies was equivalent to
declaring, either that no people but amiable people ever get fat, or
that the accidental addition of so many pounds of flesh has a directly
favourable influence over the disposition of the person on whose body
they accumulate. I have invariably combated both these absurd
assertions by quoting examples of fat people who were as mean, vicious,
and cruel as the leanest and the worst of their neighbours. I have
asked whether Henry the Eighth was an amiable character? Whether Pope
Alexander the Sixth was a goo