Yes, there she was at Essleinont, securely there, near him, to be seen any day; worth claiming, too; a combatant figure, provocative of the fight and the capture rather than repellent.  The respect enforced by her attitude awakened in him his inherited keen old relish for our intersexual strife and the indubitable victory of the stronger, with the prospect of slavish charms, fawning submission, marrowy spoil.  Or perhaps, preferably, a sullen submission, reluctant charms; far more marrowy.  Or who can say?—­the creature is a rocket of the shot into the fiery garland of stars; she may personate any new marvel, be an unimagined terror, an overwhelming bewitchment:  for she carries the unexpected in her bosom.  And does it look like such indubitable victory, when the man, the woman’s husband, divided from her, toothsome to the sex, acknowledges within himself and lets the world know his utter dislike of other women’s charms, to the degree that herbal anchorites positively could not be colder, could not be chaster:  and he no forest bird, but having the garden of the variety of fairest flowers at nod and blush about him!  That was the truth.  Even Henrietta’s beauty had the effect of a princess’s birthday doll admired on show by a contemptuous boy.

Wherefore, then, did the devil in him seek to pervert this loveliest of young women and feed on her humiliation for one flashing minute?  The taste had gone, the desire of the vengeance was extinct, personal gratification could not exist.  He spied into himself, and set it down to one among the many mysteries.

Men uninstructed in analysis of motives arrive at this dangerous conclusion, which spares their pride and caresses their indolence, while it flatters the sense of internal vastness, and invites to headlong intoxication.  It allows them to think they are of such a compound, and must necessarily act in that manner.  They are not taught at the schools or by the books of the honoured places in the libraries, to examine and see the simplicity of these mysteries, which it would be here and there a saving grace for them to see; as the minstrel, dutifully inclining to the prosy in their behalf and morality’s, should exhibit; he should arrest all the characters of his drama to spring it to vision and strike perchance the chord primarily if not continually moving them, that readers might learn the why and how of a germ of evil, its flourishing under rebuke, the persistency of it after the fell creative energy has expired and pleasure sunk to be a phlegmatic dislike, almost a loathing.

This would here be done, but for signs of a barometric dead fall in Dame Gossip’s chaps, already heavily pendent.  She would be off with us on one of her whirling cyclones or elemental mad waltzes, if a step were taken to the lecturing-desk.  We are so far in her hands that we have to keep her quiet.  She will not hear of the reasons and the change of reasons for one thing and the other.  Things