more plainly than it was possible for her to see it.

Vaguely, and yet with some approach to the truth, her intuition
began to reveal to her the attitude of his mind towards her. She
believed that he was attracted, but also saw that he was not blinded
by her beauty. She was already beginning to revise her first impression
that he was shutting his eyes to every other consideration, as she
had seen so many do in their brief infatuation. His manner was not
that of one who is taking counsel of passion only. Those ominous
words--"according to what she is"--indicated that he was looking
into her mind, her character. With a sense of dismay, she was
awakening to a knowledge of the dwarfed ugliness her beauty but
partially concealed, and she felt that he, from the first, had been
discovering those defects of which she had been scarcely conscious
herself. She began to fear that her cousin's words would prove true,
and that he would not fall helplessly in love with her. Therefore
the opportunity to retaliate and to punish him for all the
mortifications that he had occasioned her, would never come. On
the contrary, he might inflict upon her, any day, the crowning
humiliation of declaring, be indifference of manner, that he had
found her out so thoroughly, as to entertain for her only feelings
of disgust and repugnance.

"Well," she concluded, recklessly, "why should I care what
he thinks? I have lived thus far without his good opinion, and I
can live a little longer, I imagine. I have had a good time for
eighteen years after my own fashion, and I will just ignore him
and have a good time still. Indeed I'll shock him to-night and
to-morrow so thoroughly, that he won't come near me again; for
I'm sick of his superior airs. I'm sick of his learned talk about