oved him. What so kind as they? Yet are they very rigorous, those
soft watchful woman's eyes. If you are below the measure they have made
of you, you will feel it in the fulness of time. She cannot but show you
that she took you for a giant, and has had to come down a bit. You feel
yourself strangely diminishing in those sweet mirrors, till at last they
drop on you complacently level. But, oh beware, vain man, of ever
waxing enamoured of that wonderful elongation of a male creature you saw
reflected in her adoring upcast orbs! Beware of assisting to delude her!
A woman who is not quite a fool will forgive your being but a man, if
you are surely that: she will haply learn to acknowledge that no mortal
tailor could have fitted that figure she made of you respectably, and
that practically (though she sighs to think it) her ideal of you was
on the pattern of an overgrown charity-boy in the regulation jacket and
breech. For this she first scorns the narrow capacities of the tailor,
and then smiles at herself. But shouldst thou, when the hour says
plainly, Be thyself, and the woman is willing to take thee as thou art,
shouldst thou still aspire to be that thing of shanks and wrests, wilt
thou not seem contemptible as well as ridiculous? And when the fall
comes, will it not be flat on thy face, instead of to the common height
of men? You may fall miles below her measure of you, and be safe:
nothing is damaged save an overgrown charity-boy; but if you fall below
the common height of men, you must make up your mind to see her rustle
her gown, spy at the looking-glass, and transfer her allegiance. The
moral of which is, that if we pretend to be what we are not, woman, for
whose amusement the farce is performed, will find us out and punish us
for it. And it is usually the end of a sentimental dalliance.

Had Sir Austin given vent to the pain and wrath it was natural he should
feel, he might have gone to unphilosophic excesses, and, however much he
lowered his reputation as a sage, Lady Blandish would have excused him:
she would not have loved him less for seeing him closer. But the poor
gentleman tasked his soul and stretched his muscles to act up to her
conception of him. He, a man of science in life, who was bound to be
surprised by nothing in nature, it was not for him to do more than
lift his eyebrows and draw in his lips at the news delivered by Ripton
Thompson, that ill bird at Raynham.

All he said, after Ripton had handed