sense in which Europe in general and Paris in particular had made him
develop. By every calculation--and her calculations, based on the
intimacy of her knowledge, had been many and deep--he would help her
the better the more intelligent he should have become; yet she was to
recognize later on that the first chill of foreseen disaster had been
caught by her as, at a given moment, this greater refinement of his
attention seemed to exhale it. It was just what she had wanted--"if
I can only get him interested--!" so that, this proving quite vividly
possible, why did the light it lifted strike her as lurid? Was it
partly by reason of his inordinate romantic good looks, those of a
gallant, genial conqueror, but which, involving so glossy a brownness
of eye, so manly a crispness of curl, so red-lipped a radiance of
smile, so natural a bravery of port, prescribed to any response
he might facially, might expressively, make a sort of florid,
disproportionate amplitude? The explanation, in any case, didn't
matter; he was going to mean well--that she could feel, and also that
he had meant better in the past, presumably, than he had managed to
convince her of his doing at the time: the oddity she hadn't now
reckoned with was this fact that from the moment he did advertise an
interest it should show almost as what she would have called weird. It
made a change in him that didn't go with the rest--as if he had broken
his nose or put on spectacles, lost his handsome hair or sacrificed
his splendid mustache: her conception, her necessity, as she saw, had
been that something should be added to him for her use, but nothing
for his own alteration.

He had affirmed himself, and his character, and his temper, and his
health, and his appetite, and his ignorance, and his obstinacy, and
his whole charming, coarse, heartless personality, during their
engagement, by twenty forms of natural emphasis, but never by emphasis