this magical rapid round which slung her more and more out of her actual into her imagined self, compelled her to proceed, denied her the right to faint and call upon the world for aid, and catch at it, though it was close by and at a signal would stop the terrible circling.  The world was close by and had begun to stare.  She half apprehended that fact, but she was in the presence of the irresistible.  In the presence of the irresistible the conventional is a crazy structure swept away with very little creaking of its timbers on the flood.  When we feel its power we are immediately primitive creatures, flying anywhere in space, indifferent to nakedness.  And after trimming ourselves for it, the sage asks your permission to add, it will be the thing we are most certain some day to feel.  Had not she trimmed herself?—­so much that she had won fame for an originality mistaken by her for the independent mind, and perilously, for courage.  She had trimmed herself and Alvan too—­herself to meet it, and Alvan to be it.  Her famous originality was a trumpet blown abroad proclaiming her the prize of the man who sounded as loudly his esteem for the quality—­in a fair young woman of good breeding.  Each had evoked the other.  Their common anticipations differed in this, that he had expected comeliness, she the reverse—­an Esau of the cities; and seeing superb manly beauty in the place of the thick-featured sodden satyr of her miscreating fancy, the irresistible was revealed to her on its divinest whirlwind.

They both desired beauty; they had each stipulated for beauty before captivity could be acknowledged; and he beholding her very attractive comeliness, walked into the net, deeming the same a light thing to wear, and rather a finishing grace to his armoury; but she, a trained disciple of the conventional in social behaviour (as to the serious points and the extremer trifles), fluttered exceedingly; she knew not what she was doing, where her hand was, how she looked at him, how she drank in his looks on her.  Her woman’s eyes had no guard they had scarcely speculation.  She saw nothing in its passing, but everything backward, under haphazard flashes.  The sight of her hand disengaged told her it had been detained; a glance at the company reminded her that those were men and women who had been other than phantoms; recollections of the words she listened to, assented to, replied to, displayed the gulfs she had crossed.  And nevertheless her brain was as quick as his to press forward to pluck the themes which would demonstrate her mental vividness and at least indicate her force of character.  The splendour of the man quite extinguished, or over-brightened, her sense of personal charm; she set fire to her brain to shine intellectually, treating the tale of her fair face as a childish tale that might have a grain of truth in it, some truth, a very little, and that little nearly worthless, merely womanly, a poor charm of her sex.  The intellectual