possessed of one key--whether the right one or not--wherewith to read the
princess, which was never possible to me when I was under stress of
passion, or of hope or despair; my perplexities over what she said, how
she looked, ceased to trouble me. I read her by this strange light: that
she was a woman who could only love intelligently--love, that is, in the
sense of giving herself. She had the power of passion, and it could be
stirred; but he who kindled it wrecked his chance if he could not stand
clear in her intellect's unsparing gaze. Twice already she must have
felt herself disillusioned by me. This third time, possibly, she blamed
her own fatally credulous tenderness, not me; but it was her third
awakening, and could affection and warmth of heart combat it? Her
child's enthusiasm for my country had prepared her for the impression
which the waxen mind of the dreamy invalid received deeply; and so, aided
by the emotional blood of youth, she gave me place in her imagination,
probing me still curiously, as I remembered, at a season when her sedate
mind was attaining to joint deliberations with the impulsive overgenerous
heart.

Then ensued for her the successive shocks of discernment. She knew the
to have some of the vices, many follies, all the intemperateness of men
who carve a way for themselves in the common roads, if barely they do
that. And resembling common men (men, in a judgement elective as hers,
common, however able), I was not assuredly to be separated by her from my
associations; from the thought of my father, for example. Her look at
him in the lake-palace library, and her manner in unfolding and folding
his recent letter to her, and in one or two necessitated allusions,
embraced a kind of grave, pitiful humour, beyond smiles or any outward
expression, as if the acknowledgement that it was so quite obliterated
the wonder that it should be so--that one such as he could exercise
influence upon her destiny. Or she may have made her reckoning