exquisitely feminine inward conflicts, plucking her out of resistance
in good old primitive fashion. You win the creature in her delicious
flutterings. He liked her thus, in cooler blood, because of society's
admiration of the capturer, and somewhat because of the strife, which
always enhances the value of a prize, and refreshes our vanity in
recollection.

Moreover, he had been matched against Willoughby: the circumstance had
occurred two or three times. He could name a lady he had won, a lady he
had lost. Willoughby's large fortune and grandeur of style had given
him advantages at the start. But the start often means the race--with
women, and a bit of luck.

The gentle check upon the galloping heart of Colonel De Craye endured
no longer than a second--a simple side-glance in a headlong pace.
Clara's enchantingness for a temperament like his, which is to say, for
him specially, in part through the testimony her conquest of himself
presented as to her power of sway over the universal heart known as
man's, assured him she was worth winning even from a hand that dropped
her.

He had now a double reason for exclaiming at the folly of Willoughby.
Willoughby's treatment of her showed either temper or weariness. Vanity
and judgement led De Craye to guess the former. Regarding her
sentiments for Willoughby, he had come to his own conclusion. The
certainty of it caused him to assume that he possessed an absolute
knowledge of her character: she was an angel, born supple; she was a
heavenly soul, with half a dozen of the tricks of earth. Skittish filly
was among his phrases; but she had a bearing and a gaze that forbade
the dip in the common gutter for wherewithal to paint the creature she