ve gladly accepted
her pity as a sort of challenge, and said, 'Be it so; let us see who will
come safest out of this encounter,' and yet he felt in his heart he could
not.

First of all, her beauty had really dazzled him, and the thousand graces
of a manner of which he had known nothing captivated and almost bewildered
him. He could not reply to her in the same tone he used to any other. If
he fetched her a book or a chair, he gave it with a sort of deference that
actually reacted on himself, and made him more gentle and more courteous,
for the time. 'What would this influence end in making me?' was his
question to himself. 'Should I gain in sentiment or feeling? Should I have
higher and nobler aims? Should I be anything of that she herself described
so glowingly, or should I only sink to a weak desire to be her slave, and
ask for nothing better than some slight recognition of my devotion? I take
it that she would say the choice lay with _her_, and that I should be the
one or the other as she willed it, and though I would give much to believe
her wrong, my heart tells me that I cannot. I came down here resolved to
resist any influence she might attempt to have over me. Her likeness
showed me how beautiful she was, but it could not tell me the dangerous
fascination of her low liquid voice, her half-playful, half-melancholy
smile, and that bewitching walk, with all its stately grace, so that every
fold as she moves sends its own thrill of ecstasy. And now that I know all
these, see and feel them, I am told that to me they can bring no hope! That
I am too poor, too ignoble, too undistinguished, to raise my eyes to such
attraction. I am nothing, and must live and die nothing.

'She is candid enough, at all events. There is no rhapsody about her when
she talks of poverty. She chronicles every stage of the misery, as though
she had felt them all; and how unlike it she looks! There is an almost
insolent well-being about her that puzzles me. She will not heed this, or
suffer that, because it looks mean. Is this the subtle worship she offers
Wealth, and is it thus she offers up her prayer to Fortune?

'But why should she assume I must be her slave?' cried he aloud, in a sort
of defiance. 'I have shown her no such preference, nor made any advances
that would show I want to win her favour. Without denying that she is
beautiful, is it so certain it is the kind of beauty I admire? She has
scores of fascinations--I do not deny it; b