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Rh a sex taught from earliest infancy that its chief duty is to love—which therefore is vanquished from the beginning. He had laid to this the strange piquancy that he had found at all times in his relations with his ward. She—at least it appeared to him—was not to be classed among those women who ask only to be loved; for she defied all men—himself most particularly—as openly and frankly as she appeared also in all other ways to defy convention. In their correspondence she usually had had the better of it; and he felt now that she had bested him in the only two personal interviews he ever had had with her.

He flushed as he recollected that in both these interviews, he—whose reputation was that he never lost his temper—had ended with being furiously and impotently angry