ome of them were frankly and contentedly cynical; some were of a
brutality compared with which the tastes and manners of a bargee would
have seemed ladylike; some were as refined and sensitive as English
old maids, though less scrupulous and much less shy; the one was
as generous as an Irish sailor, the next was as mean as a Normandy
peasant; some had offered her rivers of rubies, and some had proposed
to take her incognito for a drive in a cab, because it would be so
amusing--and so inexpensive. Yet in their families and varieties
they were all of the same species, all human and all subject to the
ordinary laws of attraction and repulsion. Rufus Van Torp was not like
them.

Neither of Margaret's selves could look upon him as a normal human
being. At first sight there was nothing so very unusual in his face,
certainly nothing that suggested a monster; and yet, whatever mood she
chanced to be in, she could not be with him five minutes without being
aware of something undefinable that always disturbed her profoundly,
and sometimes became positively terrifying. She always felt the
sensation coming upon her after a few moments, and when it had
actually come she could hardly hide her repulsion till she felt, as
to-day, that she must run from him, without the least consideration
of pride or dignity. She might have fled like that before a fire or a
flood, or from the scene of an earthquake, and more than once nothing
had kept her in her place but her strong will and healthy nerves. She
knew that it was like the panic that seizes people in the presence of
an appalling disturbance of nature.

Doubtless, when she had talked with Mr. Van Torp just now, she had
been disgusted by the indifferent way in which he spoke of poor Miss
Bamberger's sudden death; it was still more certain that what he said
about the book, and his very ungentlemanly behaviour in throwing it
into the sea, had roused her justifiable anger. But she would have
smiled at the thought that an exhibition of heartlessness, or the most
utter lack of manners, could have made her wish to run away from any
other man. Her life had accustomed her to people who had no more
feeling than Schreiermeyer, and no better manners than Pompeo
Stromboli. Van Torp might have been on his very best behaviour that
morning, or at any of her previous chance meetings with him; sooner
or later she would have felt that same absurd and unreasoning fear
of him, and would have found it very ha