Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/266

Rh The night before he had resolved to avoid her, to cease to see her, to forget her. She had wounded him, and he had told himself that it was best to let the world have her, body and soul. Now chance had overruled his resolve: he could not war with his fate—he let it come as it might. He had found his way to influence her; he knew that he could move her as no other could; yet he hesitated to say to her what must unite them or part them.

Besides, since this woman had grown dear to him with a passion born alike out of her physical beauty and his own sense of power on her, and his insight into the richer possibilities of her nature, the colder calculations which had occupied him at his first knowledge of her seemed to him base and unworthy: if he had not loved her he would have pursued her with no pang of conscience; having grown to love her, to love her loveliness, and her pride, and her variableness, and her infinite charm, and her arrogant faults, to love her in a word, and to desire indescribably to lead her from the rank miasma of the pleasures and pomps of the world into a clearer and higher S 2