in her company, he
sometimes set himself to display a deliberate negligence. No difficult
undertaking, for he was distinctly repelled by the thought of any relations with
her more intimate than had been brought about by his cold intellectual sympathy.
Her person was still as disagreeable to him as when he first met her in her
uncle's house at Twybridge. If a man sincerely hopes that a woman does not love
him (which can seldom be the case where a suggestion of such feeling ever
arises), he will find it easy to believe that she does not. Peak not only had
the benefit of this principle; the constitution of his mind made it the opposite
of natural for him to credit himself with having inspired affection. That his
male friends held him in any warm esteem always appeared to him improbable, and
as regards women his modesty was profound. The simplest explanation, that he was
himself incapable of pure devotedness, perhaps hits the truth. Unsympathetic,
however, he could with no justice be called, and now that the reality of
Marcella's love was forced upon his consciousness he thought of her with sincere
pity, - the emotion which had already possessed him (though he did not then
analyse it) when he unsuspectingly looked into her troubled face a few days ago.
    It was so hard to believe, that, on reaching home, he sat for a long time
occupied with the thought of it, to the exclusion of his own anxieties. What!
this woman had made of him an ideal such as he himself sought among the most
exquisite of her sex? How was that possible? What quality of his, personal,
psychical, had such magnetic force? What sort of being was he in Marcella's
eyes? Reflective men must often enough marvel at the success of whiskered and
trousered mortals in wooing the women of their desire, for only by a specific
imagination can a person of one sex assume the emotions of the other. Godwin had
neither that endowment nor the peculiar self-esteem which makes love-winning a
matter of course to some intelligent males. His native arrogance signified a low
estimate of mankind at large, rather than an overweening appreciation of his own
qualities, and in his most presumptuous moments he had never claimed the sexual
prefulgence which many a commonplace fellow so gloriously exhibits. At most, he
had hoped that some woman might find him interesting, and so be led on to like
him well enough for the venture of matrimony. Passion at length constrained him
to believe that his ardour might be genuinely reciprocated, but even now it was
only in paroxysms that he