One thing more I
would touch upon which men are more likely never to have thought of than
to have forgotten: that the love which a beautiful woman gives a man, is
in itself not an atom more precious than that which a plain woman gives.
In the two hearts they are the same, if the hearts be like; if not, the
advantage may well be with the plain woman. The love of a beautiful
woman is no more thrown away than the love of the plainest. The same
holds with regard to women of differing intellectual developments or
endowment. But when a woman of high hopes and aims--a woman filled with
eternal aspirations after life, and unity with her divine original gives
herself to such a one as lord Gartley, I cannot help thinking she must
have seriously mistaken some things both in him and in herself, the
consequence, probably, of some self-sufficiency, ambition, or other
fault in her, which requires the correction of suffering.
Hester found her lover now very pleasant. If sometimes he struck a
jarring chord, she was always able to find some way of accounting for
it, or explaining it away--if not entirely to her satisfaction, yet so
far that she was able to go on hoping everything, and for the present to
put off any further consideration of the particular phenomenon to the
time when, like most self-deceiving women, she _scarcely_ doubted
she would have greater influence over him--namely, the time when, man
and wife, they would be one flesh.
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