he had expected comeliness, she the reverse--an Esau of the cities; and
seeing superb manly beauty in the place of the thick-featured sodden
satyr of her miscreating fancy, the irresistible was revealed to her on
its divinest whirlwind.

They both desired beauty; they had each stipulated for beauty before
captivity could be acknowledged; and he beholding her very attractive
comeliness, walked into the net, deeming the same a light thing to wear,
and rather a finishing grace to his armoury; but she, a trained disciple
of the conventional in social behaviour (as to the serious points and the
extremer trifles), fluttered exceedingly; she knew not what she was
doing, where her hand was, how she looked at him, how she drank in his
looks on her. Her woman's eyes had no guard they had scarcely
speculation. She saw nothing in its passing, but everything backward,
under haphazard flashes. The sight of her hand disengaged told her it
had been detained; a glance at the company reminded her that those were
men and women who had been other than phantoms; recollections of the
words she listened to, assented to, replied to, displayed the gulfs she
had crossed. And nevertheless her brain was as quick as his to press
forward to pluck the themes which would demonstrate her mental vividness
and at least indicate her force of character. The splendour of the man
quite extinguished, or over-brightened, her sense of personal charm; she
set fire to her brain to shine intellectually, treating the tale of her
fair face as a childish tale that might have a grain of truth in it, some
truth, a very little, and that little nearly worthless, merely womanly,
a poor charm of her sex. The intellectual endowment was rarer: still
rarer the moral audacity. O, to match this man's embracing
discursiveness! his ardour, his complacent energy, the full strong sound
he brought out of all subjects! He struck, and they rang. There was a
bell in everything for him; Nature gave out her cry, and significance was