--it is temperament.
Possibly I have a touch of what she misses. And until I began to write,
I often wished to be without it. Anyhow, I can see that, sweet and
delightful as she is, a man of temperament might in exalted moments find
a note flat in the music of companionship.

Somerled has, I should think, spent at least ten years in trying to bury
his temperament under layers of hard common sense. But all the time it
was there, like boiling hot lava under a cold crust; and when Aline told
me how he valued their friendship, I wondered whether she were right,
and just how deeply his admiration of her was rooted in his heart. I
wondered if she were the type of woman he would want, not only for a
friend, but by and by for his wife; and caring for Aline as I do, I
worried about her affairs a good deal, apart from the influence they
were likely to have on the book. Still, I confess I thought as much
about the people in the story I had in mind as I did of my sister--if
not more, at that time.

Then, the night Aline and I had our big talk about Somerled, the Girl
came. And that was the end of the book for me too.

If some time I grow callous enough to write her into a romance (she'd
fit into nothing else), I doubt if I could make clear the extraordinary
and instantaneous effect of her on all those she approaches.

It isn't only her looks, though she's beautiful, as some blithe sprite
met by chance in a forest. It isn't only her youth, for she is too
absurdly young. A girl, to be taken seriously by a grown man, should be
at least one-and-twenty. She is, I believe, on the lilied edge of
eighteen. Ridiculous! Yet where she is, other women, also beautiful and
also young, are dimmed like candles that have burned all night when a
window is flung open in the face of sunrise. Something in her eyes, her
smile, the turn of her head, the light on her lashes and the shadow
under them, the way she catches in her breath when she laughs and looks
at you, the curl of her hair and the colour and fragrance of it, call to
the deeps in a man. I defy any man to resist her completely. I have
watched men in the street as I walked with her, or in hotel dining-rooms
as she came in. Be they old or young, weak or strong, grave or gay,
intelligent or dull, at sight of her the same pagan light of romance
springs into their eyes. Mysterious and irresistible as the lure of the
Pied Piper is the lure of this child who knows nothing of her own power.

She