I should think the
chance less, on the whole, that he would be willing to marry her than she
to marry him.
There is one other thing that might happen. If the interest he awakes in
her gets to be a deep one, and yet has nothing of love in it, she will
glance off from him into some great passion or other. All excitements run
to love in women of a certain--let us not say age, but youth. An
electrical current passing through a coil of wire makes a magnet of a bar
of iron lying within it, but not touching it. So a woman is turned into
a love-magnet by a tingling current of life running round her. I should
like to see one of them balanced on a pivot properly adjusted, and watch
if she did not turn so as to point north and south,--as she would, if the
love-currents are like those of the earth our mother.
Pray, do you happen to remember Wordsworth's "Boy of Windermere"? This
boy used to put his hands to his mouth, and shout aloud, mimicking the
hooting of the owls, who would answer him
"with quivering peals,
And long halloos and screams, and echoes loud
Redoubled and redoubled.
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