hen she looked up, and he was startled by her eyes. Where he had
expected grief, he saw a shrinking animation.

"Write to me often," she said, imperiously.

"Of course. But don't trouble to answer much. Your hands are so full
here."

She frowned.

"Trouble! Why do you spoil me so? Demand--insist--that I should write!"

"Very well," he said, smiling, "I demand--I insist!"

She drew a long breath, and went slowly away from him into the house.
Certainly the antagonism of her secret thoughts, though it persisted,
was no longer merely cold or critical. For it concerned one who was not
only the master of his own life, but threatened unexpectedly to become
the master of hers.

She had begun, indeed, to please her imagination with the idea of a
relation between them, which, while it ignored the ordinary relations of
marriage, should yet include many of the intimacies and refinements of
love. More and more did the surprises of his character arrest and occupy
her mind. She found, indeed, no "plaster saint." Her cool intelligence
soon detected the traces of a peevish or stubborn temper, and of a
natural inertia, perpetually combated, however, by the spiritual energy
of a new and other self exfoliating from the old; a self whose acts and
ways she watched, sometimes with the held breath of fascination,
sometimes with a return of shrinking or fear. That a man should not only
appear but be so good was still in her eyes a little absurd. Perhaps her
feeling was at bottom the common feeling of the sceptical nature. "We
should listen to the higher voices; but in such a way that if another
hypothesis were true, we should not have been too completely duped."

She was ready, also, to convict him of certain prejudices and
superstitions which roused in her an intellectual impatience. But when
all was said, Delafield, unconsciously, was drawing her towards him, as
the fowler draws a fluttering bird. It was the exquisite refinement of
those spiritual insights and powers he possessed which constantly
appealed, not only to her heart, but--a very important matter in Julie's
case--to her taste, to her own carefully tempered instinct for the rare
and beautiful.

He was the master, then, she admitted, of a certain vein of spiritual
genius. Well, here should he lead--and even, if he pleased, command her.
She would sit at his feet, and he should open to her ranges of feeling,
delights, and subtleties of moral sensation hitherto unknown to her.