So, as I said, Ralph puzzled Florence. His devotion to study for its own sake, utterly indifferent to its bringing him name or fame; his distaste for society, in which, nevertheless, his rank and prospects would have insured him a cordial reception; his goodness itself; the union of strength, with gentleness which to her seemed almost weakness; nay, more, his very faults—his whole nature, in short—baffled her utterly. And, above all, his indifference to her charms! For in this last there was a certain amount of inconsistency. Not in his being always kind and attentive to her; that went for nothing, she knew he would have been so to any woman. But, over and above this, she saw that he admired her. In a quiet, cold sort of way, as if she had been a picture or a statue. She was pleasing to him as a beautiful object, for his perceptions were refined and correct to a fault. And even she felt, and truly, that to be thus admired by him was worth all the coarser adulation of the many—the vulgar triumph of reigning as a ball-room belle. But this was all! Beyond this point she could not succeed in impressing him. At last, after much cogitation, she decided in her own mind that he, a student, if not already a “savant,” must be of a different nature from other men, and she must content herself accordingly. One comfort certainly was hers. She need fear no rival, past, present, or future. His never having been specially attracted by any young lady had become, as it were, a proverb in the family. And as for anything else—. No; she felt instinctively there was nothing to fear. No awkward entanglement which might have precluded the idea of matrimony, or engendered a distaste thereto. And she was right. The life of this man, from earliest boy hood to the present time, would have stood the strictest scrutiny.