too impalpable to
be visible to ordinary eyes.

Emily Wharton was a tall, fair girl, with grey eyes, rather exceeding
the average proportions as well as height of women. Her features
were regular and handsome, and her form was perfect; but it was by
her manner and her voice that she conquered, rather than by her
beauty,--by those gifts and by a clearness of intellect joined with
that feminine sweetness which has its most frequent foundation in
self-denial. Those who knew her well, and had become attached to her,
were apt to endow her with all virtues, and to give her credit for
a loveliness which strangers did not find on her face. But as we do
not light up our houses with our brightest lamps for all comers,
so neither did she emit from her eyes their brightest sparks till
special occasion for such shining had arisen. To those who were
allowed to love her no woman was more lovable. There was innate in
her an appreciation of her own position as a woman, and with it a
principle of self-denial as a human being, which it was beyond the
power of any Mrs. Roby to destroy or even to defile by small stains.

Like other girls she had been taught to presume that it was her
destiny to be married, and like other girls she had thought much
about her destiny. A young man generally regards it as his destiny
either to succeed or to fail in the world, and he thinks about that.
To him marriage, when it comes, is an accident to which he has hardly
as yet given a thought. But to the girl the matrimony which is or
is not to be her destiny contains within itself the only success
or failure which she anticipates. The young man may become Lord
Chancellor, or at any rate earn his bread comfortably as a county
court judge. But the girl can look forward to little else than the
chance of having a good man for her husband;--a good man, or if her
tastes lie in that direction, a rich man. Emily Wharton had doubtless
thought about these things, and she sincerely believed that she had
found the good man in Ferdinand Lopez.

The man, certainly, was one strangely endowed with the power of
creating a belief. When going to Mr. Wharton at his chambers he had
not intended to cheat the lawyer into any erroneous idea about his
family, but he had resolved that he would so discuss the questions of
his own condition, which would probably be raised, as to leave upon
the old man's mind an unfounded conviction that in regard to money
and income he had no reason