the name
of the man who married her is not Longears--not to himself, is the main
point; nor will it be to the world when he shows that it is not so to
himself.

Suppose he went to her, would she be trying at domination? The woman's
pitch above woman's beauty was perceived to be no intermittent beam, but
so living as to take the stamp of permanence. More than to say it was
hers, it was she. What a deadly peril brought into view was her
character-soul, some call it: generally a thing rather distasteful in
women, or chilling to the masculine temperament. Here it attracts. Here,
strange to say, it is the decided attraction, in a woman of a splendid
figure and a known softness. By rights, she should have more
understanding than to suspect the husband as guilty of designs done to
death in romances. However, she is not a craven who compliments him by
rearing him, and he might prove that there is no need for fear. But she
would be expecting explanations before the reconcilement. The bosom of
these women will keep on at its quick heaving until they have heard
certain formal words, oaths to boot. How speak them?

His old road of the ladder appeared to Fleetwood an excellent one for
obviating explanations and effecting the reconcilement without any
temporary seeming forfeit of the native male superiority. For there she
is at Esslemont now; any night the window could be scaled. 'It is my
husband.' The soul was in her voice when she said it.

He remembered that it had not ennobled her to him then; had not endeared;
was taken for a foreign example of the childish artless, imperfectly
suited to our English clime.' The tone of adorable utterances, however
much desired, is never for repetition; nor is the cast of divine sweet
looks; nor are the particular deeds-once pardonable, fitly pleaded. A
second scaling of her window--no, night's black hills girdle the scene
with hoarse echoes; the moon rushes out of her clouds grimacing. Even
Fleetwood's devil, much addicted to cape and sword and ladder, the
vulpine and the gryphine, rejected it.

For she had, by singular transformation since, and in spite of a deluging
grotesque that was antecedently incredible, she had become a personage,
counting her adherents; she could put half the world in motion on her
side. Yell those Welshmen to scorn, they were on a plane finding native
ground with as large a body of these English. His baser mind bowed to the
fact. Her aspect was entirely different;