mere physical charm,
nevertheless physical charm is the most powerful, though not always
acknowledged, motive of their choice. 'Because of this,' says the
pathetic Hilda Donne in _A Marriage Ceremony_, touching her cheek, which
is terribly disfigured by a birth-mark, 'I have never had _love_. Can
you think what that means? You can't. Once I thought I was not going to
be quite shut out--once; but I was mistaken. I have found out that it is
for one's body that one is loved, and not for one's soul.'

Hilda unconsciously exaggerates, for it appears that Rutherford Hope,
though at first affected with disgust by her disfigurement, and
convinced that no healthy man could consort with 'so unnatural a woman,'
had come at last to regard her as a possible wife--before he was
confronted with the sudden temptation to secure a fortune by wedding
Betty Ochiltree, in compliance with the conditions of her millionaire
uncle's will. Yet Hilda's comment is substantially sound. Even
Rutherford, with all the sense of his mature years, and all the culture
that enabled him to appreciate her poetic gift, would have had to argue
himself into a marriage with her.

The ugliness of Adam Drewe, from which his mother turned in disgust at
his birth, and which in youth drove him across the seas in an agony of
sensitiveness from the woman he loved, was a less serious affliction
than that of Hilda Donne; but we know that he continued to be keenly
reminded of its disadvantages long after time had proved the sterling
qualities of his manhood, lessened his deformity, and brought him fame
and wealth.

Compared with the previous illustration, however, his case is at fault
in failing to give a sufficient description of his deformity. But that
he himself long thought it an insuperable bar to his happiness is clear.
When he fell in love with Fidelia Plunket, she was temporarily blind.
His affection for her was returned, and he knew it, but dreading the
disillusionment that would ensue when her sight was restored, he fled to
Australia and determined to abandon all thought of her as a wife. Urged
to return, because 'when a woman _is_ a woman,' and really in love with
a man, 'there's no camel she won't swallow for him,' Drewe replied that
his camel was just the one camel that no woman had been known to
swallow, or, at any rate, to digest. And he remained--for twenty years.

The plots of Ada Cambridge's novels are of the episodical order, and the
author, despit