augh. "You are infinitely practical,
Katherine. (I am going to call you Katherine for the next few minutes.
Because I think of you as Katherine, I love to speak your name to
yourself; it seems to bring me a little nearer to you.) Listen to me.
Don't you think you could endure me as a husband? I am a better fellow
than I seem, and mine is no foolish boy's fancy. I am a better man when
I am near you. Then this old cousin of mine will leave me all he
possesses if you are my wife, and the Baroness de Burgh, with money
enough to keep her place among her peers, would have no mean position;
nor is a husband passionately devoted to you unworthy of
consideration."

"It is not indeed. But, Mr. De Burgh, do you honestly think that
devotion would last? These violent feelings often work their own
destruction."

"Ay: God knows they do, amazingly fast," he returned, with a sigh and a
far-away look. "But what you say applies to all men. If you ever marry
you must run the risk of inconstancy in the man you accept. I am at
least old enough and experienced enough to value a good woman when I
have found one, especially when she does not make her goodness a bore.
And you--you have inspired me with something different from anything I
have ever felt before. Yes, yes," he went on, angrily, as he noticed a
slight smile on her lips. "I see you try to treat this as only the
stereotype talk of a lover who wants your money more than yourself; but
if you listen to the judgment of your own heart, it is true and honest
enough to recognize truth in another, and it will tell you that,
whatever my faults (and they are legion), sneaking and duplicity are not
among them. It is quite true that when first I heard of you I thought
your fortune would be just the thing to put me right, as I have no doubt
my dear friend Mrs. Ormonde has impressed upon you, but from the moment
I first spoke to you I felt, I knew, there was something about you
different from other women. I also knew that in the effort to win the
heiress I was heavily handicapped by the sudden strong passion for the
woman which seized me."

"That surely ought to have been a means of success?" said Katherine, a
good deal interested in his account of himself.

"No: it made me, for the first time in my life, hesitating,
self-distrustful, and awfully disgusted at having to take your money
into consideration. Had you been an ordinary woman, ready to exchange
your fortune for the social position I c