o with a
skillful opponent aroused my ambition, and stung into life all the
dormant obstinacy of my character, so that, at the end of a week--for
she, too, staked all her pride upon finally seeing me at her feet like
all the others--we two stood confronting each other almost alone; her
former circle of admirers had withdrawn discomfited.

"The great aim of my tactics was to represent myself as thoroughly
_blase_ and unsusceptible, and to act as though I found the great charm
of my intercourse with her merely in the fact that I had at last
encountered a kindred nature, who, like me, had long since disclaimed,
as a ridiculous delusion, the possession of any warmth of feeling. She
accepted the _role_ I assigned to her, but it never occurred to her for
a moment to cease trying to tempt me out of mine. Occasional human
emotions, into which I now and then allowed my calumniated heart
to be betrayed, gave her some right to hope; and the freedom of a
watering-place afforded a hundred opportunities for putting me to the
test.

"Well, it turned out just as it could not help turning out. One evening
we came home from a stormy sailing excursion, which had not been
entirely free from danger, half wet through and hungry. The return trip
had been delayed from the fact of the skipper's having been obliged to
stop in the midst of the storm, to mend, as well as he could under the
circumstances, a leak in his boat; the consequence was it was late when
we reached her fisher's cottage. She herself seemed to have forgotten
her enforced _role_ for the moment, and appeared to have no other end
in view than to refresh and warm me before dismissing me to my
lodgings. While she went into her chamber and put on some dry garments,
I was forced to stay in the front-room, which was itself little more
than a small bedroom, and exchange my coat--which had been soaked
through and through with the salt water--for a Turkish jacket she had
selected from her wardrobe; and soon, the tea steaming on the table,
the warmth of the fire--which was very grateful in spite of its being
early fall--and, above all, the extraordinary manner in which we were
dressed after the dangers we had escaped, threw us both into a reckless
and merry mood such as I had never before experienced in her presence.

"But even now I was still very far from feeling anything like love, not
even as much as I had sometimes felt in the most trivial of my
adventures. In the midst of my spor