it for a series of skimming discussions, like
swallow-flights from the nest beneath the eaves to the surface of the
stream, perpetually reverting to her, and provoking spirited replies,
leading her to fly with him in expectation of a crowning compliment that
must be singular and was evidently gathering confirmation in his mind
from the touchings and probings of her character on these flights.

She was like a lady danced off her sense of fixity, to whom the
appearance of her whirling figure in the mirror is both wonderful and
reassuring; and she liked to be discussed, to be compared to anything,
for the sake of being the subject, so as to be sure it was she that
listened to a man who was a stranger, claiming her for his own; sure it
was she that by not breaking from him implied consent, she that went
speeding in this magical rapid round which slung her more and more out of
her actual into her imagined self, compelled her to proceed, denied her
the right to faint and call upon the world for aid, and catch at it,
though it was close by and at a signal would stop the terrible circling.
The world was close by and had begun to stare. She half apprehended that
fact, but she was in the presence of the irresistible. In the presence of
the irresistible the conventional is a crazy structure swept away with
very little creaking of its timbers on the flood. When we feel its power
we are immediately primitive creatures, flying anywhere in space,
indifferent to nakedness. And after trimming ourselves for it, the sage
asks your permission to add, it will be the thing we are most certain
some day to feel. Had not she trimmed herself?--so much that she had won
fame for an originality mistaken by her for the independent mind, and
perilously, for courage. She had trimmed herself and Alvan too--herself
to meet it, and Alvan to be it. Her famous originality was a trumpet
blown abroad proclaiming her the prize of the man who sounded as loudly
his esteem for the quality--in a fair young woman of good breeding. Each
had evoked the other. Their common anticipations differed in this, that
he had expected comeliness, she the reverse--an Esau of the cities; and
seeing superb manly beauty in the place of the thick-featured sodden
satyr of her miscreating fancy, the irresistible was revealed to her on
its divinest whirlwind.

They both desired beauty; they had each stipulated for beauty before
captivity could be acknowledged; and he beholding her ver