“A village girl is as capable of passion as you or I,” replied he, and had he not remembered (what he was somewhat apt to forget) that he was a gentleman talking to a lady, he would have added:  “And a great deal more so than you.”  Miss Le Pettit, who considered that he had forgotten it, gave the little movement known as “bridling,” which reared her ringletted head a trifle higher on her white shoulders, then decided to front the obnoxious word bravely as a woman of the world.  She had met with it chiefly in books where it was used solely to denote anger.  There had been, for instance, the tale of “Henry:  or, the Fatal Effect of Passion.” ...  Henry had slain a school-fellow in his rage, and had been duly hanged; yet something told Miss Le Pettit that was not how Mr. Constantine was using the word....  She rose to it splendidly.

“Passion ... and pray where do you find such a thing in this story of the vanity of a child of fifteen?”

“In the usual place, ma’am,” said Mr. Constantine (now entirely forgetting that which Miss Le Pettit ever remembered)—­“in her soul.  Did you think it merely a thing of the body?  The body may be the objective of passion, but the quality itself is what is meant by the word.  It is generated in the soul and may pour itself into strange vessels.”

“Or even shower its ardours upon a piece of white riband?” cried Miss Le Pettit, with a titter.

“Shall we say upon Beauty itself?” corrected Mr. Constantine more gravely than he had yet spoken.  Then, with a smile, he elaborated:  “For as passion is in the soul, so is beauty in the heart, and hearts have differing vision.  That was Loveday’s desire.  Translate this paltry thing into terms of other ambitions—­and where is any one of us then?  Unless, indeed, we are so bloodless, so without imagination, that we cannot but be content with our lot just as it is.”

Miss Le Pettit, who had never seen reason for anything but contentment, and looked upon it as a Christian virtue, demurred with:—­

“The whole affair is so ridiculously out of proportion.”

Mr. Constantine glanced, with admiration in his gallant though elderly eye, over Miss Le Pettit’s figure as she lay back in the gilt chair; glanced from her high, polished forehead, round which the smooth chestnut hair showed as gleaming, from her parted red lips and bare, sloping shoulders to her tiny waist and the outward spring beneath it of the clouded tulle that lapped in a dozen baby waves over the globe of her swelling crinoline.

“When I was a young man,” he said, “the ladies went about in little robes, such as you would not wear nowadays as a shift.  We thought them pretty then, and thought none the worse of them because they made the women look more or less as God saw fit to make ’em.  Yet now we think you equally lovely as you float about the world like monstrous beautiful bubbles, so that a man must adore at a distance and only guess at Paradise in a gust of wind....  Yet to the next generation, believe me or not as you like, your garb will seem too preposterous to be true, and a generation later Time will pay you the unkindest cut of all—­you will be picturesque, and your grand-daughters will revive you—­for fancy dress.  Proportion, ma’am, is nothing in the world but fashion.”