ioned
only by his thoughts. Before he fell asleep, his patriotism was riveted.
A land that could produce such a specimen of girlhood outvalued Europe,
Asia, and Africa combined--aye, a thousand times--and topped and
exceeded creation.

III.

Among the effects and symptoms of love, there is an involuntary action
of the mind which, since the days of Stendhal, has been known as
crystallization. When a man becomes interested in a woman, when he
pictures her not as she really is, but as she seems to him--as she ought
to be, in fact--he experiences, first, admiration; second, desire;
third, hope; and, behold, love or its counterfeit is born.

This crystallization affects the individual according to his nature. If
that nature be inexperienced, unworn--in a word, if it be virginal, its
earliest effects are those of a malady. On the other hand, if the nature
on which it operates has received the baptism of fire, its effect is
that of a tonic. To the one it is a fever, to the other a bugle-call. In
the first instance, admiration is pursued by self-depreciation, desire
is pinioned before conventional obstacles, and hope falters beneath a
weight of doubt. In the second, admiration, desire, and hope are fused
into one sentiment, the charm of the chase, the delight of the
prospective quarry. As an example, there is Werther, and there is also
Don Juan.

Now Tristrem Varick had never known a mother, sisters he had none, the
feminine had been absent from his life, but in his nature there was an
untarnishable refinement. During his student-days at Harvard, and
throughout his residence abroad, there had been nothing of that which
the French have agreed to denominate as _bonnes fortunes_. Such things
may have been in his path, waiting only to be gathered, but, in that
case, certain it is that he had passed them by unheeded. To use the
figurative phrase, he was incapable of stretching his hand to any woman
who had not the power of awakening a lasting affection; and during his
wanderings, and despite, too, the example and easy morals of his
comrades, no such woman having crossed his horizon, he had been innocent
of even the most fugitive liaison. Nevertheless, the morning after the
dinner in Gramercy Park, crystallization had done its work. He awoke
with the surprise and wonder of an inexperienced sensation; he awoke
with the consciousness of being in love, wholly, turbulently, absurdly
in love with a girl to whom he had not add