fever of longing that
made him reckless of his judgment. In fact, he was not now absorbed in
judging, but in realizing, the woman with whom he had fallen in love.

If she had appealed to him at any one moment more than at another, it
was when she took him into her confidence with that sidelong look, as
she slipped the novel into the large vase. Then, as at other times
during the evening, but then more particularly, she had betrayed her
consciousness of him as a young man, of herself as a woman and a
beauty. He saw that she had no desire to talk with him on the
impersonal plane of the mind, that she welcomed, rather than feared,
the discovery of her femininity, even in her political interests. She
might say this or that, as the fancy took her, but she knew it made no
difference to an admirer what she said. Her peculiar fascination lay
in a consciousness of sex which is the explanation of the power to win
men that distinguishes one woman above the many, to their envy and
mystification.

Leigh was too attractive a man to have been allowed to reach his
present age entirely ignorant of the psychology of women, though
comparative poverty and laborious studies had limited his education in
this direction, and left him unspoiled. He knew enough to realize the
secret of Miss Wycliffe's charm, and to reflect consciously upon it in
connection with himself. Mere beauty, he knew, would have left him
cold, if it had not stirred within him the resentment aroused by a
promise unfulfilled; intellectual gifts alone would have wearied and
antagonised; evident virtue would have seemed humdrum and uninspiring.
It was this delicious appeal of the woman to the man that had won him.

He was yet to learn that this quality is not seldom accompanied by the
most baffling counter-current, that holds its natural movement in
apparent suspension. Why had a woman so imperially endowed remained so
long unmarried? It was not that she looked her age, which he felt to
be little less than his own, but that she implied it by her lack of
inexperience. It was not that eight or nine and twenty made a spinster
from the modern point of view, but that to reach that age unmarried she
must have resisted many a suit. Had he lived longer in New England, he
would have known more women of this kind, women who hide the passionate
heart of a Helen beneath the austere life of a Diana, hoarding their
gifts of love as a miser hoards his gold, partly because of cr