ruin of light, and lying in the dust, was enshrined in a glory.  One all-powerful, revolting against beauty and splendour, gave herself to the damned of night; preferred Gwynplaine to Antinoues; excited by curiosity, she entered the shadows, and descending within them, and from this abdication of goddess-ship was rising, crowned and prodigious, the royalty of the wretched.  “You are hideous.  I love you.”  These words touched Gwynplaine in the ugly spot of pride.  Pride is the heel in which all heroes are vulnerable.  Gwynplaine was flattered in his vanity as a monster.  He was loved for his deformity.  He, too, was the exception, as much and perhaps more than the Jupiters and the Apollos.  He felt superhuman, and so much a monster as to be a god.  Fearful bewilderment!

Now, who was this woman?  What did he know about her?  Everything and nothing.  She was a duchess, that he knew; he knew, also, that she was beautiful and rich; that she had liveries, lackeys, pages, and footmen running with torches by the side of her coroneted carriage.  He knew that she was in love with him; at least she said so.  Of everything else he was ignorant.  He knew her title, but not her name.  He knew her thought; he knew not her life.  Was she married, widow, maiden?  Was she free?  Of what family was she?  Were there snares, traps, dangers about her?  Of the gallantry existing on the idle heights of society; the caves on those summits, in which savage charmers dream amid the scattered skeletons of the loves which they have already preyed on; of the extent of tragic cynicism to which the experiments of a woman may attain who believes herself to be beyond the reach of man—­of things such as these Gwynplaine had no idea.  Nor had he even in his mind materials out of which to build up a conjecture, information concerning such things being very scanty in the social depths in which he lived.  Still he detected a shadow; he felt that a mist hung over all this brightness.  Did he understand it?  No.  Could he guess at it?  Still less.  What was there behind that letter?  One pair of folding doors opening before him, another closing on him, and causing him a vague anxiety.  On the one side an avowal; on the other an enigma—­avowal and enigma, which, like two mouths, one tempting, the other threatening, pronounce the same word, Dare!

Never had perfidious chance taken its measures better, nor timed more fitly the moment of temptation.  Gwynplaine, stirred by spring, and by the sap rising in all things, was prompt to dream the dream of the flesh.  The old man who is not to be stamped out, and over whom none of us can triumph, was awaking in that backward youth, still a boy at twenty-four.

It was just then, at the most stormy moment of the crisis, that the offer was made him, and the naked bosom of the Sphinx appeared before his dazzled eyes.  Youth is an inclined plane.  Gwynplaine was stooping, and something pushed him forward.  What? the season, and the night.  Who? the woman.