little sooner, might have averted the necessity for such a _coup_, was calculated to occupy him entirely, and banish from his mind, anything which might divert him from the pursuit of his object. And now it seemed wonderful to him that he could have thus forgotten her--now, when he was under the renewed spell of her beauty and her scorn. There was an extraordinary fascination for him, even in the midst of his anger, in the mingled strangeness and familiarity with which she presented herself to his mind. He had a good deal of imagination, though but little poetry, in his nature, and the extraordinarily exceptional position of this woman and himself--the strangeness of the knowledge that she had accepted the fact of there being nothing mutual or even relative in their position now or ever--appealed, in the midst of his passion, to his imagination. That she should dare to treat him thus,--that she should know him so little as to dare to treat him thus. He thought this, he said this more than once through his shut teeth; but he was not a fool, even in his rage, and he knew he was talking folly to himself in the moment that he uttered the words. Why should she not dare? Indeed, there was no daring about it. He had made the position for himself, and he was for the first time brought face to face with all the details of it. What was that position externally in the world's sight, in the only point of view in which he had any practical right to consider it? Just this: Miss Lambert did not choose to admit him to her acquaintance. He was helpless; she was in her right. He might force her to meet him in the houses of other people--at the Marchioness of Carabas' house, for instance--simply because she could not afford, out of consideration for her own social position, to give up her patroness; and also (he began to understand Gertrude now sufficiently to know that this second argument was by far the stronger), because she Would never suffer the consideration of meeting or not meeting him to influence her actions, to form a motive of her conduct in the smallest degree. He felt that with a smart twinge of pain, the keen pain of mortified self-love. He had simply ceased to exist for her--that was all; she had taken the full sense of their convention, and was acting on it _tout bonnement_. He might, therefore, calculate safely upon meeting her, without her consent, at other houses than her own; but forcing or inducing her to admit him there, was, he felt, entirely beyond his power. He was wholly insensible to the extreme incongruity of such a possibility, had it existed; and no wonder, for in their position all was incongruous, and propriety or impropriety had lost their meaning.