ementina
when he was not thinking about something he _had_ to think about, have I
not said nearly enough on the matter? Should I ever dream of attempting to
set forth what love is in such a man for such a woman? There are
comparatively few that have more than the glimmer of a notion of what love
means. God only knows how grandly, how passionately, yet how calmly, how
divinely, the man and the woman he has made might, may, shall love each
other. One thing only I will dare to say--that the love that belonged to
Malcolm's nature was one through the very nerves of which the love of God
must rise and flow and return as its essential life. If any man think that
such a love could no longer be the love of the man for the woman, he knows
his own nature, and that of the woman he pretends or thinks he adores, but
in the darkest of glasses.

Malcolm's lowly idea of himself did not at all interfere with his loving
Clementina, for at first his love was entirely dissociated from any
thought of hers. When the idea, the mere idea, of her loving him presented
itself, from whatever quarter suggested, he turned from it with shame and
self-reproof: the thought was in its own nature too unfit. That splendor
regard him! From a social point of view there was of course little
presumption in it. The marquis of Lossies bore a name that might pair
itself with any in the land; but Malcolm did not yet feel that the title
made much difference to the fisherman. He was what he was, and that was
something very lowly indeed. Yet the thought would at times dawn up from
somewhere in the infinite matrix of thought that perhaps if he went to
college and graduated and dressed like a gentleman, and did everything as
gentlemen do--in short, claimed his rank and lived as a marquis should, as
well as a fisherman might--then--then--was it not, might it not be, within
the bounds of possibility--just within them--that the great-hearted,
generous, liberty-loving Lady Clementina, groom as he had been, _menial_
as he had heard himself called, and as, ere yet he knew his birth, he had
laughed to hear, knowing that his service was true--that she, who despised
nothing human, would be neither disgusted nor contemptuous nor wrathful
if, from a great way off, at an awful remove of humility and worship, he
were to wake in her a surmise that he dared feel toward her as he had
never felt and never could feel toward any other? For would it not be
altogether counter to the princip