, is apt to make a young man more than commonly a child of nerves: nearly as
much so as the dissipated, with the difference that they are hilarious while
wasting their treasury, which he is not; and he may recover under favouring
conditions, which is a point of vantage denied to them. Physically he had stout
reserves, for he had not disgraced the temple. His intemperateness lay in the
craving to rise and lead: a precocious ambition. This apparently modest young
man started with an aim - and if in the distance and with but a slingstone, like
the slender shepherd fronting the Philistine, all his energies were in his aim -
at Government. He had hung on the fringe of an Administration. His party was
out, and he hoped for higher station on its return to power. Many perplexities
were therefore buzzing about his head; among them at present one sufficiently
magnified and voracious to swallow the remainder. He added force to the
interrogation as to why that Bell should sound its inhuman strokes twice, by
asking himself why he was there to hear it! A strange suspicion of a bewitchment
might have enlightened him if he had been a man accustomed to yield to the
peculiar kind of sorcery issuing from that sex. He rather despised the power of
women over men: and nevertheless he was there, listening to that Bell, instead
of having obeyed the call of his family duties, when the latter were urgent. He
had received letters at Lugano, summoning him home, before he set forth on his
present expedition. The noisy alarum told him he floundered in quags, like a
silly creature chasing a marsh-lamp. But was it so? Was it not, on the contrary,
a serious pursuit of the secret of a woman's character? - Oh, a woman and her
character! Ordinary women and their characters might set to work to get what
relationship and likeness they could. They had no secret to allure. This one
had: she had the secret of lake waters under rock, unfathomable in limpidness.
He could not think of her without shooting at nature, and nature's very sweetest
and subtlest, for comparisons. As to her sex, his active man's contempt of the
petticoated secret attractive to boys and graylings, made him believe that in
her he hunted the mind and the spirit: perchance a double mind, a twilighted
spirit; but not a mere woman. She bore no resemblance to the bundle of women.
Well, she was worth studying; she had ideas, and could give ear to ideas.
Furthermore, a couple of the
