lusion?

I will go,--he said,--and made a movement with his left arm to let
himself down from his high chair.

No,--no,--he doesn't mean it,--you must not go,--said a kind voice next
him; and a soft, white hand was laid upon his arm.

Iris, my dear!--exclaimed another voice, as of a female, in accents that
might be considered a strong atmospheric solution of duty with very
little flavor of grace.

She did not move for this address, and there was a _tableau_ that lasted
some seconds. For the young girl, in the glory of half-blown womanhood,
and the dwarf, the cripple, the misshapen little creature covered with
Nature's insults, looked straight into each other's eyes.

Perhaps no handsome young woman had ever looked at him so in his life.
Certainly the young girl never had looked into eyes that reached
into her soul as these did. It was not that they were in themselves
supernaturally bright,--but there was the sad fire in them that flames
up from the soul of one who looks on the beauty of woman without hope,
but, alas! not without emotion. To him it seemed as if those amber gates
had been translucent as the brown water of a mountain-brook, and through
them he had seen dimly into a virgin wilderness, only waiting for the
sunrise of a great passion for all its buds to blow and all its bowers
to ring with melody.

That is my image, of course,--not his. It was not a simile that was
in his mind, or is in anybody's at such a moment,--it was a pang of
wordless passion, and then a silent, inward moan.

A lady's wish,--he said, with a certain gallantry of manner,--makes
slaves of us all.--And Nature, who is kind to all her children, and
never leaves the smallest and saddest of all her human failures without
one little comfit of self-love at the bottom of his poor ragged
pocket,--Nature suggested to him that he had turned his sentence well;
and he fell into a reverie, in which the old thoughts that were always
hovering just outside the doors guarded by Common Sense, and watching
for a chance to squeeze in, knowing perfectly well they would be
ignominiously kicked out again as soon as Common Sense saw them, flocked
in pellmell,--misty, fragmentary, vague, half-ashamed of themselves, but
still shouldering up against his inner consciousness till it warmed with
their contact:--John Wilkes's--the ugliest man's in England--saying,
that with half-an-hour's start he would cut out the handsomest man
in all the land in any woman's go