d softly
averted her head to hide the suffusion of her cheek.

"I know this is the talk of a dreamer--of a rapt, romantic lunatic. I
_do_ dream. I _will_ dream now and then; and if she has inspired romance
into my prosaic composition, how can I help it?

"What a child she is sometimes! What an unsophisticated, untaught thing!
I see her now looking up into my face, and entreating me to prevent them
from smothering her, and to be sure and give her a strong narcotic. I
see her confessing that she was not so self-sufficing, so independent of
sympathy, as people thought. I see the secret tear drop quietly from her
eyelash. She said I thought her childish, and I did. She imagined I
despised her. Despised her! It was unutterably sweet to feel myself at
once near her and above her--to be conscious of a natural right and
power to sustain her, as a husband should sustain his wife.

"I worship her perfections; but it is her faults, or at least her
foibles, that bring her near to me, that nestle her to my heart, that
fold her about with my love, and that for a most selfish but
deeply-natural reason. These faults are the steps by which I mount to
ascendency over her. If she rose a trimmed, artificial mound, without
inequality, what vantage would she offer the foot? It is the natural
hill, with its mossy breaks and hollows, whose slope invites ascent,
whose summit it is pleasure to gain.

"To leave metaphor. It delights my eye to look on her. She suits me. If
I were a king and she the housemaid that swept my palace-stairs, across
all that space between us my eye would recognize her qualities; a true
pulse would beat for her in my heart, though an unspanned gulf made
acquaintance impossible. If I were a gentleman, and she waited on me as
a servant, I could not help liking that Shirley. Take from her her
education; take her ornaments, her sumptuous dress, all extrinsic
advantages; take all grace, but such as the symmetry of her form renders
inevitable; present her to me at a cottage door, in a stuff gown; let
her offer me there a draught of water, with that smile, with that warm
good-will with which she now dispenses manorial hospitality--I should
like her. I should wish to stay an hour; I should linger to talk with
that rustic. I should not feel as I _now_ do; I should find in her
nothing divine; but whenever I met the young peasant, it would be with
pleasure; whenever I left her, it would be with regret.

"How culpably careless