If any gentleman will have the kindness to stop this run-away comparison, I shall be much obliged to him.  All I intended to say was, that we need not wait for hearts to break out in flames to know that they are full of combustibles and that a spark has got among them.  I don’t pretend to say or know what it is that brings these two persons together;—­and when I say together, I only mean that there is an evident affinity of some kind or other which makes their commonest intercourse strangely significant, so that each seems to understand a look or a word of the other.  When the young girl laid her hand on the little gentleman’s arm,—­which so greatly shocked the Model, you may remember,—­I saw that she had learned the lion-tamer’s secret.  She masters him, and yet I can see she has a kind of awe of him, as the man who goes into the cage has of the monster that he makes a baby of.

One of two things must happen.  The first, is love, downright love, on the part of this young girl, for the poor little misshapen man.  You may laugh, if you like.  But women are apt to love the men who they think have the largest capacity of loving;—­and who can love like one that has thirsted all his life long for the smile of youth and beauty, and seen it fly his presence as the wave ebbed from the parched lips of him whose fabled punishment is the perpetual type of human longing and disappointment?  What would become of him, if this fresh soul should stoop upon him in her first young passion, as the flamingo drops out of the sky upon some lonely and dark lagoon in the marshes of Cagliari, with a flutter of scarlet feathers and a kindling of strange fires in the shadowy waters that hold her burning image in their trembling depths?

—­Marry her, of course?—­Why, no, not of course.  I should think the chance less, on the whole, that he would be willing to marry her than she to marry him.

There is one other thing that might happen.  If the interest he awakes in her gets to be a deep one, and yet has nothing of love in it, she will glance off from him into some great passion or other.  All excitements run to love in women of a certain—­let us not say age, but youth.  An electrical current passing through a coil of wire makes a magnet of a bar of iron lying within it, but not touching it.  So a woman is turned into a love-magnet by a tingling current of life running round her.  I should like to see one of them balanced on a pivot properly adjusted, and watch if she did not turn so as to point north and south,—­as she would, if the love-currents are like those of the earth our mother.

Pray, do you happen to remember Wordsworth’s “Boy of Windermere”?  This boy used to put his hands to his mouth, and shout aloud, mimicking the hooting of the owls, who would answer him

  “with quivering peals,
  And long halloos and screams, and echoes loud
  Redoubled and redoubled.”