omanhood,
and the dwarf, the cripple, the misshapen little creature covered with
Nature's insults, looked straight into each other's eyes.

Perhaps no handsome young woman had ever looked at him so in his life.
Certainly the young girl never had looked into eyes that reached into her
soul as these did. It was not that they were in themselves
supernaturally bright,--but there was the sad fire in them that flames up
from the soul of one who looks on the beauty of woman without hope, but,
alas! not without emotion. To him it seemed as if those amber gates had
been translucent as the brown water of a mountain brook, and through them
he had seen dimly into a virgin wilderness, only waiting for the sunrise
of a great passion for all its buds to blow and all its bowers to ring
with melody.

That is my image, of course,--not his. It was not a simile that was in
his mind, or is in anybody's at such a moment,--it was a pang of wordless
passion, and then a silent, inward moan.

A lady's wish,--he said, with a certain gallantry of manner,--makes
slaves of us all.--And Nature, who is kind to all her children, and never
leaves the smallest and saddest of all her human failures without one
little comfit of self-love at the bottom of his poor ragged
pocket,--Nature suggested to him that he had turned his sentence well;
and he fell into a reverie, in which the old thoughts that were always
hovering dust outside the doors guarded by Common Sense, and watching for
a chance to squeeze in, knowing perfectly well they would be
ignominiously kicked out again as soon as Common Sense saw them, flocked
in pell-mell,--misty, fragmentary, vague, half-ashamed of themselves, but
still shouldering up against his inner consciousness till it warmed with
their contact:--John Wilkes's--the ugliest man's in England--saying, that
with half-an-hour's start he would cut out the handsomest man in all the
land in any woman's good graces; Cadenus--old and savage--leading captive
Stella and Vanessa; and then the stray line of a ballad, "And a winning
tongue had he,"--as much as to say, it is n't looks, after all, but
cunning words, that win our Eves over,--just as of old when it was the
worst-looking brute of the lot that got our grandmother to listen to his
stuff and so did the mischief.

Ah, dear me! We rehearse the part of Hercules with his club, subjugating
man and woman in our fancy, the first by the weight of it, and the second
by our handling of i