; he felt the having
been diminished, and his requiring a rapid transportation from these
parts for him to regain his proper stature. Had he misconducted himself
at the moment of danger? It is a ghastly thought, that the craven impulse
may overcome us. But no, he could reassure his repute for manliness. He
had done as much as a man could do in such a situation.

At the same time, he had done less than the woman.

Needed she to have gone so far? Why precipitate herself into the jaws of
the beast?

Now she, proposes to burn the child's wound. And she will do it if they
let her. One, sees her at the work,--pale, flinty; no faces; trebly the
terrific woman in her mild way of doing the work. All because her old
father recommended it. Because she thinks it a duty, we will say; that is
juster. This young woman is a very sword in the hand of her idea of duty.
She can be feminine, too,--there is one who knows. She can be
particularly distant, too. If in timidity, she has a modest view of
herself--or an enormous conception of the magi that married her. Will she
take the world's polish a little?

Fleetwood asked with the simplicity of the superior being who will
consequently perhaps bestow the debt he owes. . .

But his was not the surface nature which can put a question of the sort
and pass it. As soon as it had been formed, a vision of the elemental
creature calling him husband smote to shivers the shell we walk on, and
caught him down among the lower forces, up amid the higher; an infernal
and a celestial contest for the extinction of the one or the other of
them, if it was not for their union. She wrestled with him where the
darknesses roll their snake-eyed torrents over between jagged horns of
the netherworld. She stood him in the white ray of the primal vital heat,
to bear unwithering beside her the test of light. They flew, they chased,
battled, embraced, disjoined, adventured apart, brought back the count of
their deeds, compared them,--and name the one crushed! It was the one
weighted to shame, thrust into the cellar-corner of his own disgust, by
his having asked whether that starry warrior spirit in the woman's frame
would 'take polish a little.'

Why should it be a contention between them? For this reason: he was
reduced to admire her act; and if he admired, he could not admire without
respecting; if he respected, perforce he reverenced; if he reverenced, he
worshipped. Therefore she had him at her feet. At the fe