an heiress.
No musician of honour would do so. Still less was it conceivable that Catherine
would give him the slightest pretext for such daring. The large cheque that Mr.
Arrowpoint was to draw in Klesmer's name seemed to make him as safe an inmate as
a footman. Where marriage is inconceivable, a girl's sentiments are safe.
    Klesmer was eminently a man of honour, but marriages rarely begin with
formal proposals, and moreover, Catherine's limit of the conceivable did not
exactly correspond with her mother's.
    Outsiders might have been more apt to think that Klesmer's position was
dangerous for himself if Miss Arrowpoint had been an acknowledged beauty; not
taking into account that the most powerful of all beauty is that which reveals
itself after sympathy and not before it. There is a charm of eye and lip which
comes with every little phrase that certifies delicate perception or fine
judgment, with every unostentatious word or smile that shows a heart awake to
others; and no sweep of garment or turn of figure is more satisfying than that
which enters as a restoration of confidence that one person is present on whom
no intention will be lost. What dignity of meaning goes on gathering in frowns
and laughs which are never observed in the wrong place; what suffused
adorableness in a human frame where there is a mind that can flash out
comprehension and hands that can execute finely! The more obvious beauty, also
adorable sometimes - one may say it without blasphemy - begins by being an
apology for folly, and ends like other apologies in becoming tiresome by
iteration; and that Klesmer, though very susceptible to it, should have a
passionate attachment to Miss Arrowpoint, was no more a paradox than any other
triumph of a manifold sympathy over a monotonous attraction. We object less to
be taxed with the enslaving excess of our passions than with our deficiency in
wider passion; but if the truth were known, our reputed intensity is often the
dulness of not knowing what else to do with ourselves. Tannhäuser, one suspects,
was a knight of ill-furnished imagination, hardly of larger discourse than a
heavy Guardsman; Merlin had certainly seen his best days, and was merely
repeating himself, when he fell into that hopeless captivity; and we know that
Ulysses felt so manifest an ennui under similar circumstances that Calypso
herself furthered his departure. There is indeed a report that he afterwards
left Penelope; but since she was habitually absorbed in worsted work, and it was
probably from her that Telemachus got his mean, pettifogging disposition, always
anxious about the property and the daily consumption of meat, no inference can