y attractive
comeliness, walked into the net, deeming the same a light thing to wear,
and rather a finishing grace to his armoury; but she, a trained disciple
of the conventional in social behaviour (as to the serious points and the
extremer trifles), fluttered exceedingly; she knew not what she was
doing, where her hand was, how she looked at him, how she drank in his
looks on her. Her woman's eyes had no guard they had scarcely
speculation. She saw nothing in its passing, but everything backward,
under haphazard flashes. The sight of her hand disengaged told her it had
been detained; a glance at the company reminded her that those were men
and women who had been other than phantoms; recollections of the words
she listened to, assented to, replied to, displayed the gulfs she had
crossed. And nevertheless her brain was as quick as his to press forward
to pluck the themes which would demonstrate her mental vividness and at
least indicate her force of character. The splendour of the man quite
extinguished, or over-brightened, her sense of personal charm; she set
fire to her brain to shine intellectually, treating the tale of her fair
face as a childish tale that might have a grain of truth in it, some
truth, a very little, and that little nearly worthless, merely womanly, a
poor charm of her sex. The intellectual endowment was rarer: still rarer
the moral audacity. O, to match this man's embracing discursiveness! his
ardour, his complacent energy, the full strong sound he brought out of
all subjects! He struck, and they rang. There was a bell in everything
for him; Nature gave out her cry, and significance was on all sides of
the universe; no dead stuff, no longer any afflicting lumpishness. His
brain was vivifying light. And how humane he was! how supremely tolerant!
Where she had really thought instead of flippantly tapping at the doors
of thought, or crying vagrantly for an echo, his firm footing in the
region thrilled her; and where she had felt deeper than fancifully, his
wise tenderness overwhelmed. Strange to consider: with all his precious
gifts, which must make the gift of life thrice dear to him, he was
fearless. Less by what he said than by divination she discerned that he
knew not fear. If for only that, she would have hung to him like his
shadow. She could have detected a brazen pretender. A meaner mortal
vaunting his great stores she would have written down coxcomb. Her social
training and natural perception r