 am always asleep here?«
    »We shall have to make a public exhibition of the Beauty.«
    This dash of his liveliness defeated her.
    She left him, feeling the contempt of the brain feverishly quickened and
fine-pointed, for the brain chewing the cud in the happy pastures of
unawakenedness. So violent was the fever, so keen her introspection, that she
spared few, and Vernon was not among them. Young Crossjay, whom she considered
the least able of all to act as an ally, was the only one she courted with a
real desire to please him; he was the one she affectionately envied; he was the
youngest, the freest, he had the world before him, and he did not know how
horrible the world was, or could be made to look. She loved the boy from
expecting nothing of him. Others, Vernon Whitford, for instance, could help, and
moved no hand. He read her case. A scrutiny so penetrating under its air of
abstract thought-fulness, though his eyes did but rest on her a second or two,
signified that he read her line by line, and to the end - excepting what she
thought of him for probing her with that sharp steel of insight without a
purpose.
    She knew her mind's injustice. It was her case, her lamentable case - the
impatient panic-stricken nerves of a captured wild creature, which cried for
help. She exaggerated her sufferings to get strength to throw them off, and lost
it in the recognition that they were exaggerated: and out of the conflict issued
recklessness, with a cry as wild as any coming of madness; for she did not blush
in saying to herself; »If some one loved me!« Before hearing of Constantia, she
had mused upon liberty as a virgin Goddess, - men were out of her thoughts; even
the figure of a rescuer, if one dawned in her mind, was more angel than hero.
That fair childish maidenliness had ceased. With her body straining in her
dragon's grasp, with the savour of loathing, unable to contend, unable to speak
aloud, she began to speak to herself, and all the health of her nature made her
outcry womanly: - »If I were loved!« - not for the sake of love, but for free
breathing; and her utterance of it was to ensure life and enduringness to the
wish, as the yearning of a mother on a drowning ship is to get her infant to
shore. »If some noble gentleman could see me as I am and not disdain
