Aminta promised herself to show the friend a livelier affection at their next meeting.

A seventh letter, signed ‘Adolphus,’ came by post, was read and locked up in her jewel-box.  They were all nigh destruction for a wavering minute or so.  They were placed where they lay because the first of them had been laid there, the box being a strong one, under a patent key, and discovery would mean the terrible.  They had not been destroyed because they had, or seemed to her to have, the language of passion.  She could read them unmoved, and appease a wicked craving she owned to having, and reproached herself with having, for that language.

Was she not colour in the sight of men?  Here was one, a mouthpiece of numbers, who vowed that homage was her due, and devotion, the pouring forth of the soul to her.  What was the reproach if she read the stuff unmoved?

But peruse and reperuse it, and ask impressions to tell our deepest instinct of truthfulness whether language of this character can have been written to two women by one hand!  Men are cunning.  Can they catch a tone?  Not that tone!

She, too, Mrs. Amy May, was colour in the sight of men.  Yet it seemed that he could not have written so to the Queen of Blondes.  And she, by repute, was as dangerous to slight as he to attract.  Her indifference exonerated him.  Besides, a Queen of Blondes would not draw the hearts out of men in England, as in Italy and in Spain.  Aminta had got thus far when she found ‘Queen of Brunes’ expunged by a mist:  she imagined hearing the secretary’s laugh.  She thought he was right to laugh at her.  She retorted simply:  ‘These are feelings that are poetry.’

A man may know nothing about them, and be an excellent schoolmaster.

Suggestions touching the prudence of taking Mrs. Lawrence into her confidence, as regarded these troublesome letters of the man with the dart in his breast, were shuffled aside for various reasons:  her modesty shrank; and a sense of honour toward the man forbade it.  She would have found it easier to do if she had conspired against her heart in doing it.  And yet, cold-bloodedly to expose him and pluck the clothing from a passion—­dear to think of only when it is profoundly secret—­struck her as an extreme baseness, of which not even the woman who perused and reperused his letters could be guilty.

Her head rang with some of the lines, and she accused her head of the crime of childishness, seeing that her heart was not an accomplice.  At the same time, her heart cried out violently against the business of a visit to Lady de Culme, and all the steps it involved.  Justly she accused her heart of treason.  Heart and head were severed.  This, as she partly apprehended, is the state of the woman who is already on the slope of her nature’s mine-shaft, dreading the rush downwards, powerless to break away from the light.

Letters perused and reperused, coming from a man never fervently noticed in person, conjure features one would wish to put beside the actual, to make sure that the fiery lines he writes are not practising a beguilement.  Aminta had lost grasp of the semblance of the impassioned man.  She just remembered enough of his eyes to think there might be healing in a sight of him.