to degrade himself! He was incapable of such a misalliance.

But, as I have said already, Hector, although he had never yet been in
love, was yet more than usually ready to fall in love, as belongs to the
poetic temperament, when the fit person should appear. As to what sort
she might prove depended on two facts in Hector--one, that he was
fastidious in the best meaning of the word, and the other that he was
dominated by sound good sense; a fact which even his father allowed,
although with a grudge, seeing he had hitherto manifested no devotion to
business, but spent his free time in literary pursuits. Of the special
nature of those pursuits his father knew, or cared to know, nothing; and
as to his mother, she had not even a favorite hymn.

I may say, then, that the love of womankind, which in solution, so to
speak, pervaded every atomic interstice of the nature of Hector, had
gradually, indeed, but yet rapidly, concentrated and crystallized around
the idea of Annie--the more homogeneously and absorbingly that she was
the first who had so moved him. It was, indeed, in the case of each a
first love, although in the case of neither love at first sight.

Almost from the hour when first Annie entered the family, Hector had
looked on her with eyes of interest; but, for a time, she had gone about
the house with a sense almost of being there upon false pretenses, for
she knew that she was doing what she did from no regard to any of its
members, but only to gain the money whose payment would relieve her from
an ever-present consciousness of guilt; and for this cause, if for no
other, she was not in danger of falling in love with Hector. She was,
indeed, too full of veneration for her master and mistress, and for
their son so immeasurably above her, to let her thoughts rest upon him
in any but a distantly worshipful fashion.