‘Is it not?’ said Mary, looking back, calm and firm, into the sparkling, restless depths of his eye.
In that moment, two souls, going with the whole force of their being in two opposite directions, looked out of their windows at each other with a fixed and earnest recognition.
Burr was practised in every act of gallantry; he had made womankind a study: he never saw a beautiful face and form without a sort of restless desire to experiment upon it, and try his power over the interior inhabitant. But just at this moment something streamed into his soul from those blue, earnest eyes, which brought back to his mind what pious people had so often told him of his mother—the beautiful and early-sainted Esther Burr.
He was one of those persons who systematically managed and played upon himself and others, as a skilful musician on an instrument. Yet one secret of his fascination was the naïveté with which at some moments he would abandon himself to some little impulse of a nature originally sensitive and tender. Had the strain of feeling which now awoke in him come over him elsewhere, he would have shut down some spring in his mind, and excluded it in a moment; but talking with a beautiful creature whom he wished to please, he gave way at once to the emotion: real tears stood in his fine eyes; he raised Mary’s hand to his lips and kissed it, saying—
‘Thank you, my beautiful child, for so good a thought! it is truly a noble sentiment, though practicable only to those gifted with angelic natures.’
‘Oh, I trust not!’ said Mary, earnestly, touched and wrought upon more than she herself knew by the beautiful eyes, the modulated voice, the charm of manner, which seemed to enfold her like an Italian summer.
Burr sighed—a real sigh of his better nature, but passed out with all the more freedom that he felt it would interest his fair companion, who, for the time being, was the one woman in the world to him.
‘Pure, artless souls like yours,’ he said, ‘cannot measure the temptations of those who are called to the real battle of life. In a world like this, how many nobler aspirations fall withered in the fierce heat and struggle of the conflict!’