Here it attracts.  Here, strange to say, it is the decided attraction, in a woman of a splendid figure and a known softness.  By rights, she should have more understanding than to suspect the husband as guilty of designs done to death in romances.  However, she is not a craven who compliments him by rearing him, and he might prove that there is no need for fear.  But she would be expecting explanations before the reconcilement.  The bosom of these women will keep on at its quick heaving until they have heard certain formal words, oaths to boot.  How speak them?

His old road of the ladder appeared to Fleetwood an excellent one for obviating explanations and effecting the reconcilement without any temporary seeming forfeit of the native male superiority.  For there she is at Esslemont now; any night the window could be scaled.  ’It is my husband.’  The soul was in her voice when she said it.

He remembered that it had not ennobled her to him then; had not endeared; was taken for a foreign example of the childish artless, imperfectly suited to our English clime.’  The tone of adorable utterances, however much desired, is never for repetition; nor is the cast of divine sweet looks; nor are the particular deeds-once pardonable, fitly pleaded.  A second scaling of her window—­no, night’s black hills girdle the scene with hoarse echoes; the moon rushes out of her clouds grimacing.  Even Fleetwood’s devil, much addicted to cape and sword and ladder, the vulpine and the gryphine, rejected it.

For she had, by singular transformation since, and in spite of a deluging grotesque that was antecedently incredible, she had become a personage, counting her adherents; she could put half the world in motion on her side.  Yell those Welshmen to scorn, they were on a plane finding native ground with as large a body of these English.  His baser mind bowed to the fact.  Her aspect was entirely different; her attitude toward him as well:  insomuch that he had to chain her to her original features by the conjuring of recollected phrases memorable for the vivid portraiture of her foregone simplicity and her devotion to ‘my husband.’

Yes, there she was at Essleinont, securely there, near him, to be seen any day; worth claiming, too; a combatant figure, provocative of the fight and the capture rather than repellent.  The respect enforced by her attitude awakened in him his inherited keen old relish for our intersexual strife and the indubitable victory of the stronger, with the prospect of slavish charms, fawning submission, marrowy spoil.  Or perhaps, preferably, a sullen submission, reluctant charms; far more marrowy.  Or who can say?—­the creature is a rocket of the shot into the fiery garland of stars; she may personate any new marvel, be an unimagined terror, an overwhelming bewitchment:  for she carries the unexpected in her bosom.  And does it look like such indubitable victory, when the man, the woman’s husband, divided from her,