at such periods, a vastly greater influence upon our own than when
robust health gives us a repellent and self-defensive energy.
Zenobia's sphere, I imagine, impressed itself powerfully on mine, and
transformed me, during this period of my weakness, into something
like a mesmerical clairvoyant.

Then, also, as anybody could observe, the freedom of her deportment
(though, to some tastes, it might commend itself as the utmost
perfection of manner in a youthful widow or a blooming matron) was
not exactly maiden-like. What girl had ever laughed as Zenobia did?
What girl had ever spoken in her mellow tones? Her unconstrained and
inevitable manifestation, I said often to myself, was that of a woman
to whom wedlock had thrown wide the gates of mystery. Yet sometimes
I strove to be ashamed of these conjectures. I acknowledged it as a
masculine grossness--a sin of wicked interpretation, of which man is
often guilty towards the other sex--thus to mistake the sweet,
liberal, but womanly frankness of a noble and generous disposition.
Still, it was of no avail to reason with myself nor to upbraid myself.
Pertinaciously the thought, "Zenobia is a wife; Zenobia has lived
and loved! There is no folded petal, no latent dewdrop, in this
perfectly developed rose!"--irresistibly that thought drove out all
other conclusions, as often as my mind reverted to the subject.

Zenobia was conscious of my observation, though not, I presume, of
the point to which it led me.

"Mr. Coverdale," said she one day, as she saw me watching her, while
she arranged my gruel on the table, "I have been exposed to a great
deal of eye-shot in the few years of my mixing in the world, but
never, I think, to precisely such glances as you are in the habit of