uncle's house at Twybridge. If a man sincerely hopes
that a woman does not love him (which can seldom be the case where a
suggestion of such feeling ever arises), he will find it easy to
believe that she does not. Peak not only had the benefit of this
principle; the constitution of his mind made it the opposite of natural
for him to credit himself with having inspired affection. That his male
friends held him in any warm esteem always appeared to him improbable,
and as regards women his modesty was profound. The simplest
explanation, that he was himself incapable of pure devotedness, perhaps
hits the truth. Unsympathetic, however, he could with no justice be
called, and now that the reality of Marcella's love was forced upon his
consciousness he thought of her with sincere pity,--the emotion which
had already possessed him (though he did not then analyse it) when he
unsuspectingly looked into her troubled face a few days ago.

It was so hard to believe, that, on reaching home, he sat for a long
time occupied with the thought of it, to the exclusion of his own
anxieties. What! this woman had made of _him_ an ideal such as he
himself sought among the most exquisite of her sex? How was that
possible? What quality of his, personal, psychical, had such magnetic
force? What sort of being was he in Marcella's eyes? Reflective men
must often enough marvel at the success of whiskered and trousered
mortals in wooing the women of their desire, for only by a specific
imagination can a person of one sex assume the emotions of the other.
Godwin had neither that endowment nor the peculiar self-esteem which
makes love-winning a matter of course to some intelligent males. His
native arrogance signified a low estimate of mankind at large, rather
than an overweening appreciation of his own qualities, and in his most
presumptuous moments he had never claimed the sexual refulgence which
many a commonplace fellow so gloriously exhibits. At most, he had hoped
that some woman might find him _interesting_, and so be led on to like
him well enough for the venture of matrimony. Passion at length
constrained him to believe that his ardour might be genuinely
reciprocated, but even now it was only in paroxysms that he held this
assurance; the hours of ordinary life still exposed him to the familiar
self-criticism, sometimes more scathing than ever. He dreaded the
looking-glass, consciously avoided it; and a like disparagement of his
inner being tort