t his manner
to her father was excellent, neither tongue-tied nor effusive, and
his few words of thanks manly and sincere. She thought to herself
that here was the beginning of a great career--the moment when the
streamlet finds its bed, and enters upon its true and destined course.

And in the warm homage, the evident attachment she had awakened in
the man before her, there was for Eugenie at the moment a peculiar
temptation. Had she not just given proof that she was set apart--that
for her there could be no more thought of love in its ordinary sense?
In her high-strung consciousness of Welby's dismissal, she felt
herself not only secure against the vulgar snares of vanity and sex,
but, as it were, endowed with a larger spiritual freedom. She had sent
away the man of whom she was in truth afraid--the man whom she might
have loved. But in this distant, hesitating, and yet strong devotion
that Fenwick was beginning to show her, there was something that
appealed--and with peculiar force, in the immediate circumstances,--to
a very sore and lonely heart. Here was no danger to be feared!--nothing
but a little kind help to a man of genius, whose great gifts might be
so easily nullified and undone by his thorny vehemence of character,
his lack of breeding and education.

The correspondence indeed which had arisen between them out of
Fenwick's first remarkable letter to her, had led unconsciously to
a new attitude on the part of Madame de Pastourelles. That he was an
interesting and promising artist she knew; that on subjects connected
with his art he could talk copiously and well, that also, she
knew; but that he could write, with such pleasant life, detail, and
ingenuity, was a surprise, and it attracted her, as it would have
attracted a French-woman of the eighteenth century. Her maimed life
had made her perforce an 'intellectual'; and in these letters, the
man's natural poetry and force stirred her enthusiasm. Hence a new
interest and receptivity in her, quickened by many small and natural
incidents--books lent and discussed, meetings in picture-galleries,
conversations in her father's house, and throughout it that tempting,
dangerous pleasure of 'doing good,' that leads astray so many on whom
Satan has no other hold! She was introducing him every week to new
friends--her friends, the friends she wished him to have; she was
making his social way plain before him; she had made her father buy
his pictures; and she meant to