Impressions.
There are women who have no power of attraction until you meet them in their homes, surrounded by evidences of an individuality which belies your first impression. Then for the first time you discover new traits of character, and evidences of thought that fascinate and hold you; then for the first time they surprise and delight you with their real selves.
Again, there are those who shine abroad, but darken their homes. In the chilling atmosphere surrounding them, no life can expand. These women are dwarfed souls. Affecting the semblance, they know not the real. The lifeless imitation of their surroundings betrays them, and chills the sensibilities of their guests.
The wife of Donald Laure, was a woman whose surroundings seemed a part of herself—a bright, light creature, glorifying the materialities about her with a certain radiance, and none could enter her home without feeling the charm that pervaded it. With her warm heart and generous impulses she seemed born but to make beholders happy.
She was, as yet, unconscious of the powers that lay dormant in her; under her childlike exterior was a soul of which even her husband knew nothing. All her knowledge of the world was like the knowledge of a maiden, far from its busy actualities.
She mused upon its wonders as they were presented to her mind by her husband, but he would have been amazed at the panorama of her thoughts.
Greater amazement would have been his, had he known the strange truth of which she herself was entirely oblivious, that the great pulsating power of Love had not yet inspired her. To be loved, caressed, cared for, had so far made her content. But, born of the English soldier and the daughter of a savage warrior, there slumbered in her soul a possibility of passion that needed only to be roused to burst into flame.
The life of excitement that society offers, brings little contentment to a woman with Dainty’s nature. She only beats the bars raised by its cold, formal laws, and sufficient unto herself, living a life within that soothes, she becomes a fascinating siren to the energetic nineteenth century man, who comes with his beliefs in materialism, and his doubts of any goodness that he cannot prove.
Such a woman is to him a creature to be tested by his methods, and broken on the wheels of his unfeeling Juggernaut of selfishness and animalism.
Being a delightfully untutored, trusting soul, she is not looking for this monster evil—self, that he has raised up and worships. At first attracted to him by a warmth of manner which has every appearance of generosity, she at last becomes interested in him so deeply, that the winning of her perfect trust, her whole heart, is an easy pastime, undertaken at seemingly accidental moments, but in reality pursued as steps in a long and carefully laid plan.