lose, shutting her eyes. She stood cool in her blush, and
eyed him, like one gravely awakened. Having been embraced and kissed,
she had to consider her taste for the man, and acknowledge a neatness
of impetuosity in the deed; and he was neither apologizing culprit
nor glorying-bandit when it was done, but something of the lyric God
tempering his fervours to a pleased sereneness, not offering a renewal
of them. He glowed transparently. He said: 'You are the woman to take
a front place in the battle!' With this woman beside him, it was a
conquered world.

Comparisons, in the jotting souvenirs of a woman of her class and set,
favoured him; for she disliked enterprising libertines and despised
stumbling youths; and the genial simple glow of his look assured her,
that the vanished fiery moment would not be built on by a dating master.
She owned herself. Or did she? Some understanding of how the other woman
had been won to the leap with him, was drawing in about her. She would
have liked to beg for the story; and she could as little do that as
bring her tongue to reproach. If we come to the den! she said to her
thought of reproach. Our semi-civilization makes it a den, where a scent
in his nostrils will spring the half-tamed animal away to wildness. And
she had come unanticipatingly, without design, except perhaps to get a
superior being to direct and restrain a gambler's hand perhaps for the
fee of a temporary pressure.

'I may be able to help a little--I hope!' she fetched a breath to say,
while her eyelids mildly sermonized; and immediately she talked of her
inheritance of property in stocks and shares.

Victor commented passingly on the soundness of them, and talked of
projects he entertained:--Parliament! 'But I have only to mention it at
home, and my poor girl will set in for shrinking.'

He doated on the diverse aspect of the gallant woman of the world.

'You succeed in everything you do,' said she, and she cordially believed
it; and that belief set the neighbour memory palpitating. Success folded
her waist, was warm upon her lips: she worshipped the figure of Success.

'I can't consent to fail, it's true, when my mind is on a thing,' Victor
rejoined.

He looked his mind on Lady Grace. The shiver of a maid went over her.
These transparent visages, where the thought which is half design is
perceived as a lightning, strike lightning into the physically feebler.
Her hand begged, with the open palm, her head shook t