high cause, and for that I know men, and know him to be the flower
of men, I give myself to him!" She makes that lofty inward exclamation
while the hand is detaching her from the roots. Even so strong a
self-justification she requires. She has not that blind glory in
excess which her younger sister can gild the longest leap with. And if,
moth-like, she desires the star, she is nervously cautious of candles.
Hence her circles about the dangerous human flame are wide and shy.
She must be drawn nearer and nearer by a fresh reason. She loves to
sentimentalize. Lady Blandish had been sentimentalizing for ten years.
She would have preferred to pursue the game. The dark-eyed dame was
pleased with her smooth life and the soft excitement that did not ruffle
it. Not willingly did she let herself be won.

"Sentimentalists," says The Pilgrim's Scrip, "are they who seek to enjoy
without incurring the Immense Debtorship for a thing done."

"It is," the writer says of Sentimentalism elsewhere, "a happy pastime
and an important science to the timid, the idle, and the heartless; but
a damning one to them who have anything to forfeit."

However, one who could set down the dying for love, as a sentimentalism,
can hardly be accepted as a clear authority. Assuredly he was not one to
avoid the incurring of the immense debtorship in any way: but he was
a bondsman still to the woman who had forsaken him, and a spoken word
would have made it seem his duty to face that public scandal which was
the last evil to him. What had so horrified the virtuous Benson, Richard
had already beheld in Daphne's Bower; a simple kissing of the fair white
hand! Doubtless the keyhole somehow added to Benson's horror. The
two similar performances, so very innocent, had wondrous opposite
consequences. The first kindled Richard to adore Woman; the second
destroyed Benson's faith in Man. But Lady Blandish knew the difference
between the two. She understood why the baronet did not speak; excused,
and respected him for it. She was content, since she must love, to love
humbly, and she had, besides, her pity for his sorrows to comfort her. A
hundred fresh reasons for loving him arose and multiplied every day.
He read to her the secret book in his own handwriting, composed for
Richard's Marriage Guide: containing Advice and Directions to a Young
Husband, full of the most tender wisdom and delicacy; so she thought;
nay, not wanting in poetry, though neither rhymed nor measu