self
whether she respects him. If she does not, her judgement will go easily
astray, intuition and observation are equally at fault, she has no key;
he has charmed her blood, that is all. But if she respects him, she
cannot be deceived; respect is her embrace of a man's character.
Aminta's vision was clear. She had therefore to juggle with the fact
revealed, that she might keep her heart from rushing out; and the
process was a disintegration of her feminine principle of docility under
the world's decrees. At each pause of her mental activity she was hurled
against the state of marriage. Compassion for her blameless fellow in
misery brought a deluge to sweep away institutions and landmarks.

But supposing the blest worst to happen, what exchange had she to
bestow? Her beauty? She was reputed beautiful. It had made a madman
of one man; and in her poverty of endowments to be generous with, she
hovered over Mr. Morsfield like a cruel vampire, for the certification
that she had a much-prized gift to bestow upon his rival.

But supposing it: she would then be no longer in the shiny garden of
the flowers of wealth; and how little does beauty weigh as all aid to
an active worker in the serious fighting world! She would be a kind of
potted rose-tree under his arm, of which he must eventually tire.

A very cold moment came, when it seemed that even the above supposition,
in the case of a woman who has been married, is shameful to her, a sin
against her lover, and should be obliterated under floods of scarlet.
For, if she has pride, she withers to think of pushing the most noble
of men upon his generosity. And, further, if he is not delicately
scrupulous, is there not something wanting in him? The very cold wave
passed, leaving the sentence: better dream of being plain friends.

Mrs. Pagnell had been quietly chewing her cud of the sullens, as was
the way with her after a snub. She now resumed her gossip of the naughty
world she knelt to and expected to see some day stricken by a bolt from
overhead; containing, as it did, such wicked members as that really
indefensible brazen Mrs. Amy May, who was only the daughter of a
half-pay naval captain, and that Marquis of Collestou, who would, they
say, decorate her with his title to-morrow, if her husband were but
somewhere else. She spread all sorts of report, about Mr. Morsfield,
and he was honour itself in his reserve about her. 'Depend upon it,
Aminta--he was not more than a boy the