But there was a plea on behalf of this woman.  The life she offered might have psalmic iteration; the dead monotony of it in prospect did, nevertheless, exorcise a devil.  Carinthia promised, it might seem to chase and keep the black beast out of him permanently, as she could, he now conceived:  for since the day of the marriage with her, the devil inhabiting him had at least been easier, ‘up in a corner.’

He held an individual memory of his bride, rose-veiled, secret to them both, that made them one, by subduing him.  For it was a charm; an actual feminine, an unanticipated personal, charm; past reach of tongue to name, wordless in thought.  There, among the folds of the incense vapours of our heart’s holy of holies, it hung; and it was rare, it was distinctive of her, and alluring, if one consented to melt to it, and accepted for compensation the exorcising of a devil.

Oh, but no mere devil by title!—­a very devil.  It was alert and frisky, flushing, filling the thin cold idea of Henrietta at a thought; and in the thought it made Carinthia’s intimate charm appear as no better than a thing to enrich a beggar, while he knew that kings could never command the charm.  Not love, only the bathing in Henrietta’s incomparable beauty and the desire to be, desire to have been, the casket of it, broke the world to tempest and lightnings at a view of Henrietta the married woman —­married to the brother of the woman calling him husband:—­’It is my husband.’  The young tyrant of wealth could have avowed that he did not love Henrietta; but not the less was he in the swing of a whirlwind at the hint of her loving the man she had married.  Did she?  It might be tried.

She?  That Henrietta is one of the creatures who love pleasure, love flattery, love their beauty:  they cannot love a man.  Or the love is a ship that will not sail a sea.

Now, if the fact were declared and attested, if her shallowness were seen proved, one might get free of the devil she plants in the breast.  Absolutely to despise her would be release, and it would allow of his tasting Carinthia’s charm, reluctantly acknowledged; not ’money of the country’ beside that golden Henrietta’s.

Yet who can say?—­women are such deceptions.  Often their fairest, apparently sweetest, when brought to the keenest of the tests, are graceless; or worse, artificially consonant; in either instance barren of the poetic.  Thousands of the confidently expectant among men have been unbewitched; a lamentable process; and the grimly reticent and the loudly discursive are equally eloquent of the pretty general disillusion.  How they loathe and tear the mask of the sham attraction that snatched them to the hag yoke, and fell away to show its grisly horrors within the round of the month, if not the second enumeration of twelve by the clock!  Fleetwood had heard certain candid seniors talk, delivering their minds in superior appreciation of unpretentious boor wenches, nature’s products,