One night—she had taken cheap lodgings for a week in a side street, in obedience to orders—he came in about nine o’clock dressed in a manner whose object was to dull the effect of his grandeur and cause him to look as much like an ordinary Englishman as possible. But, when the door was closed and he stood alone in the room with her, she saw, with the blissful pangs of an abjectly adoring woman, that he automatically resumed his magnificence of bearing. His badly fitting overcoat removed, he stood erect and drawn to his full height, so dominating the small place and her idolatrously cringing being that her heart quaked within her. Oh! to dare to cast her unloveliness at his feet, if it were only to be trampled upon and die there! No small sense of humour existed in her brain to save her from her pathetic idiocy. Romantic humility and touching sacrifice to the worshipped one were the ideals she had read of in verse and song all her life. Only through such servitude and sacrifice could woman gain man’s love—and even then only if she had beauty and the gifts worthy of her idol’s acceptance. It was really his unmitigated arrogance she worshipped and crawled upon her poor, large-jointed knees to adore. Her education, her very religion itself had taught that it was the sign of his nobility and martial high breeding. Even the women of his own class believed something of the same sort—the more romantic and sentimental of them rather enjoying being mastered by it. To Fräulein Hirsch’s mental vision, he was a sublimated and more dazzling German Rochester, and she herself a more worthy, because more submissive, Jane Eyre. Ach Gott! His high-held, cropped head—his so beautiful white hands—his proud eyes which deigned to look at her from their drooping lids! His presence filled the shabby room with the atmosphere of a Palace. He asked her a few questions; he required from her certain notes she had made; without wasting a word or glance he gave her in detail certain further orders. He stood by the table, and it was, therefore, necessary that she should approach him—should even stand quite near that she might see clearly a sketch he made hastily—immediately afterwards tearing it into fragments and burning it with a match. She was obliged to stand so near him that her skirt brushed his trouser leg. His nearness, and a vague scent of cigar smoke, mingled with the suggestion of some masculine soap or essence, were so poignant in their effect that she trembled and water rose in her eyes. In fact—and despite her terrified effort to control it, a miserable tear fell on her cheek and stood there because she dared not wipe it away.