unreasonably, the desire to dominate the life of the woman whom he
selected as the partner of his own; but the life of Isaura seemed to
escape him. If at moments, listening to her, he would say to himself,
"What a companion! life could never be dull with her," at other moments
he would say, "True, never dull, but would it be always safe?" And then
comes in that mysterious power of love which crushes all beneath its
feet, and makes us end self-commune by that abject submission of reason,
which only murmurs, "Better be unhappy with the one you love than happy
with one whom you do not." All such self-communes were unknown to
Isaura. She lived in the bliss of the hour. If Graham could have read
her heart, he would have dismissed all doubt whether he could dominate
her life. Could a Fate or an Angel have said to her, "Choose,--on one
side I promise you the glories of a Catalani, a Pasta, a Sappho, a De
Stael, a Georges Sand, all combined into one immortal name; or, on the
other side, the whole heart of the man who would estrange himself from
you if you had such combination of glories,"--her answer would have
brought Graham Vane to her feet. All scruples, all doubts, would have
vanished; he would have exclaimed, with the generosity inherent in the
higher order of man, "Be glorious, if your nature wills it so. Glory
enough to me that you would have resigned glory itself to become mine."
But how is it that men worth a woman's loving become so diffident when
they love intensely? Even in ordinary cases of love there is so
ineffable a delicacy in virgin woman, that a man, be he how refined
soever, feels himself rough and rude and coarse in comparison; and while
that sort of delicacy was pre-eminent in this Italian orphan, there came,
to increase the humility of the man so proud and so confident in himself
when he had only men to deal with, the consciousness that his
intellectual nature was hard and positive beside the angel-like purity
and the fairy-like play of hers.