survey of
him, which was unnoticed by the woman's present fiery mind as being new
or strange in any way: simply it was a fact she now read; and it directed
her to reproach herself for an abasement beneath his leadership, a blind
subserviency and surrender of her faculties to his greater powers, such
as no soul of a breathing body should yield to man: not to the highest,
not to the Titan, not to the most Godlike of men. Under cloak, they
demand it. They demand their bane.

And Victor! . . . She had seen into him.

The reproach on her was, that she, in her worship, had been slave, not
helper. Scarcely was she irreproachable in the character of slave. If it
had been utter slave! she phrased the words, for a further reproach. She
remembered having at times murmured, dissented. And it would have been a
desperate proud thought to comfort a slave, that never once had she known
even a secret opposition to the will of her lord.

But she had: she recalled instances. Up they rose; up rose everything her
mind ranged over, subsiding immediately when the service was done. She
had not conceived her beloved to be infallible, surest of guides in all
earthly-matters. Her intellect had sometimes protested.

What, then, had moved her to swamp it?

Her heart answered. And that heart also was arraigned: and the heart's
fleshly habitation acting on it besides: so flagellant of herself was
she: covertly, however, and as the chaste among women can consent to let
our animal face them. Not grossly, still perceptibly to her penetrative
hard eye on herself, she saw the senses of the woman under a charm. She
saw, and swam whirling with a pang of revolt from her personal being and
this mortal kind.

Her rational intelligence righted her speedily. She could say in truth,
by proof, she loved the man: nature's love, heart's love, soul's love.
She had given him her life.

It was a happy cross-current recollection, that the very beginning and
spring of this wild cast of her life, issued from something he said and
did (merest of airy gestures) to signify the blessing of life--how good
and fair it is. A drooping mood in her had been struck; he had a look
like the winged lyric up in blue heavens: he raised the head of the young
flower from its contemplation of grave-mould. That was when he had much
to bear: Mrs. Burman present: and when the stranger in their household
had begun to pity him and have a dread of her feelings. The lucent
splendour of his