Although the eternal fitness of things made it impossible that such
antithetical natures should ever blend in a harmony of any sort, he was
still fortunate enough not to produce the discord that would seem to
arise very naturally from such an unsympathetic contact.

Honor, without liking Vivian Standish, endured him well enough, and
enjoyed his clever conversations very well; she could not guess the
fierceness of the moral struggle that was taking place, as he calmly and
calculatingly planned her doom. She only felt a little of that repulsion
that purity and innocence naturally feel when brought into contact with
vice and guilt, for our moral natures have a special instinct of their
own, which attracts or repels characters whose influence upon them may
be beneficial or injurious, thus often causing us to dislike or distrust
persons without any apparent cause.

There was only one extra reason why Honor Edgeworth, above so many
others, failed to yield herself a ready victim to the wiles of this
fascinating man, and that was because her heart, unlike the generality
of those tiresome appendages, was closed to petition. She had learned to
love once, truly and warmly, and the gay, young, reckless hero whom she
had silently but devotedly honored at the secret shrine of her unsullied
heart, had suddenly passed out of her life, without a sign, or a token,
or a word, leaving her to weep over the wasted treasure of sentiment she
had so greedily hoarded up for him alone; not that this caused her to
lose her faith in man or vow to live a life of solitary sceptic
amendment for having indulged a foolish passion in her early days, but
because she firmly believed the object of her fond regard to be at heart
a worthy one, and because she felt that her happy lively sentiment,
becoming spent and weary, had only laid itself obscurely away, to taste
the hopeful sweetness of a "love's young dream,"--by and bye, she