d to study. For all
his abuse of it, he did not yet recognize it as morbid, but took it as
normal, and the best to be had. No doubt, he therein judged and
condemned himself, but that he never thought of--nor, perceived, would
it have been a point of any consequence to him.

From the first, he saw through Mr. Mortimer, and all belonging to him,
except Miss Yolland: she soon began to puzzle--and, so far, to please
him, though, as I have said, he did not like her. Had he been a younger
man, she would have captivated him; as it was, she would have repelled
him entirely, but that she offered him a good subject. He said to
himself that she was a bad lot, but what sort of a bad lot was not so
clear as to make her devoid of interest to him; he must discover how
she played her life-game; she had a history, and he would fain know it.
As I have said, however, so far it had come to nothing, for, upon the
surface, Sepia showed herself merely like any other worldly girl who
knows "on which side her bread is buttered."

The moment he had found, or believed he had found, what there was to
know about her, he was sure to hate her heartily. For some time after
his marriage, he appeared at his wife's parties oftener than he
otherwise would have done, just for the sake of having an eye upon
Sepia; but had seen nothing, nor the shadow of anything--until one
night, by the merest chance, happening to enter his wife's
drawing-room, he caught a peculiar glance between Sepia and a young
man--not very young--who had just entered, and whom he had not seen
before.

To not a few it seemed strange that, with her unquestioned powers of
fascination, she had not yet married; but London is not the only place
in which poverty is as repellent as beauty is attractive. At the same
time it must be confessed there was something about her which made not
a few men shy of her. Some found that, if her eyes drew them within a
certain distance, there they began to repel them, they could not tell
why. Others felt strangely uncomfortable in her presence from the
first. Not only much that a person has done, but much of what a person
is capable of, is, I suspect, written on the bodily presence; and,
although no human eye is capable of reading more than here and there a
scattered hint of the twilight of history, which is the aurora of
prophecy, the soul may yet shudder with an instinctive foreboding it
can not explain, and feel the presence, without recognizing the nat