"Your interview has been satisfactory, I presume?" he remarked drily. "She must have been prepared for your visit and met you with the most polished and facile of her arts. "There was nothing polished or facile about her. On the contrary, she was rude." "Indeed!" "Yes--what would be called rude were I to write it down. But you know I am a bit of a gourmand and relish pungent condiments. Her manner is indeed the only _sauce piquante_ that would suit her beauty." "'We forgive in proportion as we love,' says Rochefoucauld, a man of the world." "There is nothing to forgive--but there is much to love. There is a shrewd sweetness about her that took me mightily. Solitude has made her primitive. Had Byron met her we should have had a poem on the beautiful savage, with her coy and mutinous manners, with the light of golden sands upon her hair and the shine of torrid suns upon her eyes. Hear me now, Martelli, and marvel!" I continued, striking a heroic attitude. "When she speaks she looks like liberty incarnate; there is freedom in her royal gestures; pliancy and power in her step; her exquisite form undulates to her thoughts like the shadow of a dryad seen in a breezy pool!" "This, Sir, is love. Your language has about it the poetic ambiguity that no other passion would dictate." "It is love! I avow it. I am in love with this woman." "I think I can understand you, Sir. You have cultivated this emotion for the purpose of utilising it. You are giving it full licence that you may properly observe its operation. When fully developed, you will anatomise it, study its conformation, and having enlarged your knowledge of human nature by the examination, bury the corpse of the passion as the doctors bury the subjects they have dissected." "No, this is not my intention," I answered, laughing heartily; "emotion is too valuable to be wasted in the pursuit of knowledge." "Pardon me, Sir, but--do you propose to marry her?" "If she will have me." "She is to be congratulated on her beauty. It must be of a rare and powerful kind to strike love at one blow into a heart which I thought was surfeited with this sort of thing." "Her beauty is rare and powerful too." "It must be, to achieve such a victory over the experience that had driven you into the cool and calm dominion of intellectual love." "Can I not occupy both dominions? Must intellect be denied me because I fall in love?" I asked, attributing the sarcastic emphasis of his language to a fear that my marriage would lose him his situation. "I think not," he answered. "My experience of knowledge is, that it is a jealous god. Surely, Sir, your resolution is abrupt! You have declared your intention only to excite my wonder!" "On the contrary, I am quite sincere when I tell you that I am head over heels in love with this woman, and that I would marry her to-morrow if I thought she would accept me." He rose, went to the window, stared out for some moments, and then approached me.