or in spite of the vulgar elements in him there
were also elements of genius. The man was a poet and a thinker, though
he were at the same time, in some sense, an adventurer. His mind was
stored with eloquent and beautiful imagery, the poetry of others, and
poetry of his own. He could pursue the meanest personal objects in an
unscrupulous way; but he had none the less passed through a wealth of
tragic circumstance; he had been face to face with his own soul in the
wilds of the earth; he had met every sort of physical danger with
contempt; and his arrogant, imperious temper was of the kind which
attracts many women, especially, perhaps, women physically small and
intellectually fearless, like Kitty, who feel in it a challenge to their
power and their charm.

His society, then, had in these six weeks become, for Kitty, a
passion--a passion of the imagination. For the man himself, she would
probably have said that she felt more repulsion than anything else. But
it was a repulsion that held her, because of the constant sense of
reaction, of on-rushing life, which it excited in herself.

Add to these the elements of mischief and defiance in the situation, the
snatching him from Mary, her enemy and slanderer, the defiance of Lady
Grosville and all other hypocritical tyrants, the pride of dragging at
her chariot wheels a man whom most people courted even when they loathed
him, who enjoyed, moreover, an astonishing reputation abroad, especially
in that France which Kitty adored, as a kind of modern Byron, the only
Englishman who could still display in public the "pageant of a bleeding
heart," without making himself ridiculous, and perhaps enough has been
heaped together to explain the infatuation that now, like a wild spring
gust on a shining lake, was threatening to bring Kitty's light bark into
dangerous waters.

"I don't care for him," she said to herself, as she sat thinking alone,
"but I must see him--I <i>will</i>! And I will talk to him as I please, and
where I please!"

Her small frame stiffened under the obstinacy of her resolution. Kitty's
will at a moment of this kind was a fatality--so strong was it, and so
irrational.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, down-stairs, Ashe himself was wrestling with another phase of
the same situation. Lady Tranmore's note had said: "I shall be with you
almost immediately after you receive this, as I want to catch you before
you go to the Foreign Office."