Then she delineated the fine gradations by which the illusion faded,
too slowly and too late for her to withdraw the love she had conceived
for his person at that time when person and mind seemed alike
superior. She painted with the delicate touch of her sex the portrait
of a man and a scholar born to please all the world, and incapable of
condensing his affections; a pious flirt, no longer stimulated to
genuine ardor by doubts of success, but too kind-hearted to pain her
beyond measure when a little factitious warmth from time to time would
give her hours of happiness, keep her, on the whole, content, and,
above all, retain her his. Then she shifted the mirror to herself, the
fiery and faithful one, and showed David what centuries of torture a
good little creature like this Dyke, with its charming exterior, could
make a quick, and ardent, and devoted nature suffer in a year or two.
Came out in her narrative, link by link, the gentle delicious
complacency of the first period, the chill airs that soon ruffled it,
the glowing hopes, the misgivings that dashed them; then the
diminution of confidence, more complexing and exasperating than its
utter loss; the alternations of joy and doubt, the fever and the ague
of the wounded spirit; then the gusts of hatred followed by deeper
love; later still, the periodical irritation at hopes long deferred,
and still gleams of bliss between the paroxysms, so that now, as the
vulgar say in their tremendous Saxon, she "spent her time between
heaven and hell"; last of all, the sickness and recklessness of the
wornout and wearied heart over which melancholy or fury impended.
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