It is enough that
Mr. Bernard was sensible of a strange fascination, not wholly new to him,
nor unprecedented in the history of human experience, but always a
revelation when it comes over us for the first or the hundredth time,
so pale is the most recent memory by the side of the passing moment with
the flush of any new-born passion on its cheek. Remember that Nature makes
every man love all women, and trusts the trivial matter of special choice
to the commonest accident.
If Mr. Bernard had had nothing to distract his attention, he might have
thought too much about his handsome partner, and then gone home and
dreamed about her, which is always dangerous, and waked up thinking of
her still, and then begun to be deeply interested in her studies, and
so on, through the whole syllogism which ends in Nature's supreme _quod
erat demonstrandum_. What was there to distract him or disturb him? He
did not know,--but there was something. This sumptuous creature, this
Eve just within the gate of an untried Paradise, untutored in the ways
of the world, but on tiptoe to reach the fruit of the tree of
knowledge,--alive to the moist vitality of that warm atmosphere
palpitating with voices and music, as the flower of some diaecious
plant which has grown in a lone corner, and suddenly unfolding its
corolla on some hot-breathing June evening, feels that the air is
perfumed with strange odors and loaded with golden dust wafted from
those other blossoms with which its double life is shared,--this almost
overwomanized woman, might well have bewitched him, but that he had a
vague sense of a counter-charm.
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