“I do understand. There is something that attracts you. Men are so, I suppose. It is face, or voice, or figure, or manner. No one can tell why a man is attracted.” “Constance, is it possible that you are not conscious of your beauty?” She looked him full in the face, and replied slowly: “I wish I understood things. I see very well that men are more easily moved to love than women. They make the most appalling mistakes: I know of some--mistakes not to be remedied. Do not let us two make a mistake.” “It would be no mistake, believe me.” “I don’t know. There is the question of beauty. Women are not fascinated by the beauty of other women. A man is attracted by a face, and straightway attributes to the soul behind that face all the virtues possible. Women can behold a pretty face without believing that it is the stamp of purity and holiness. Besides--a face! Why, in a dozen years what will it be like? And in thirty years---- Oh! Terrible to think of!” “Never, Constance. You could never be otherwise than wholly beautiful.” She shook her head again, unconvinced. “I do not wish to be worshipped,” she repeated. “Other women may like it. To me it would be a humiliation. I don’t want worship; I want rivalry. Let me work among those who truly work, and win my own place. As for my own face, and those so-called feminine attractions, I confess that I am not interested in them. Not in the least.” “If you will only let me go on admiring----” “Oh!” she shook that admirable head impatiently, “as much as you please.” Leonard sighed. Persuasion, he knew well, was of no use with this young lady; she knew her own mind. “I will ask no more,” he said. “Your heart is capable of every emotion--except one. You are deficient in the one passion which, if you had it, would make you divine.” She laughed scornfully. “Make me divine?” she repeated. “Oh, you talk like a man--not a scholar and a philosopher, but a mere man.” She left the personal side of the question, and began to treat it generally. “The whole of poetry is disfigured with the sham divinity, the counterfeit divinity, of the woman. I do not want that kind of ascribed divinity. Therefore I do not regret the absence of this emotion which you so much desire; I can very well do without it.” She spoke with conviction, and she looked the part she played--cold, loveless, without a touch of Venus. “I was lecturing my class the other day on this very subject. I took Herrick for my text; but, indeed, there are plenty of poets who would do as well. I spoke of this sham divinity. I said that we wanted in poetry, as in human life, a certain sanity, which can only exist in a condition of controlled emotion.” It was perhaps a proof that neither lover nor maiden really felt the power of the passion called Love that they could thus, at what to some persons would be a supreme moment, drop into a cold philosophic treatment of the subject. “Perhaps love does not recognise sanity.”