This letter was the man’s life in her hands, and safe, of course.  But surely it was a proof that the man loved her?

Aminta was in her five-and-twentieth year; when the woman who is uncertain of the having been loved, and she reputed beautiful, desirable, is impelled by a sombre necessity to muse on a declaration, and nibble at an idea of a test.  If “a dangerous man to play little games with,” he could scarcely be dangerous to a woman having no love for him at all.  It meant merely that he would soon fall to writing letters like this, and he could not expect an answer to it.  But her heart really thanked him, and wished the poor gentleman to take its dumb response as his reward, for being the one sole one who had loved her.

Aminta dwelt on “the one sole one.”  Lord Ormont’s treatment had detached her from any belief in love on his part; and the schoolboy, now ambitions to become a schoolmaster, was behind the screen unlikely to be lifted again by a woman valuing her pride of youth, though he had—­behold our deceptions!—­the sympathetic face entirely absent from that of Mr. Adolphus Morsfield, whom the world would count quite as handsome—­nay, it boasted him.  He enjoyed the reputation of a killer of ladies.  Women have odd tastes, Aminta thought, and examined the gentleman’s handwriting.  It pleased her better.  She studied it till the conventional phrases took a fiery hue, and came at her with an invasive rush.

The letter was cast back into the box, locked up; there an end to it, or no interdiction of sleep.

Sleep was a triumph.  Aminta’s healthy frame rode her over petty agitations of a blood uninflamed, as lightly as she swam the troubled sea-waters her body gloried to cleave.  She woke in the morning peaceful and mildly reflective, like one who walks across green meadows.  Only by degrees, by glimpses, was she drawn to remember the trotting, cantering, galloping, leaping of an active heart during night.  We cannot, men or woman, control the heart in sleep at night.  There had been wild leapings.  Night will lead an unsatisfied heart of a woman, by way of sleep, to scale black mountains, jump jagged chasms.  Sleep is a horse that laughs at precipices and abysses.  We bid women, moreover, be all heart.  They are to cultivate their hearts, pay much heed to their hearts.  The vast realm of feeling is open to these appointed keepers of the sanctuary household, who may be withering virgins, may be childless matrons, may be unhusbanded wives.  Wandering in the vast realm which they are exhorted to call their own, for the additional attractiveness it gives them, an unsatisfied heart of woman will somewhat audaciously cross the borderland a single step into the public road of the vast realm of thinking.  Once there, and but a single step on the road, she is a rebel against man’s law for her sex.  Nor is it urgent on her that she should think defiantly in order to feel herself the rebel.  She may think submissively; with a heart (the enlarged, the scientifically plumped, the pasture of epicurean man), with her coveted heart in revolt, and from the mere act of thinking at all.