'What would this influence end in making me ?' was his question to himself.

'Should I gain in sentiment or feeling?
Should I have higher and nobler aims?
Should I be anything of that she herself described so glowingly, or should I only sink to a weak desire to be her slave, and ask for nothing better than some slight recognition of my devotion?
I take it that she would say the choice lay with _her_, and that I should be the one or the other as she willed it, and though I would give much to believe her wrong, my heart tells me that I cannot.

I came down here resolved to resist any influence she might attempt to have over me.

Her likeness showed me how beautiful she was, but it could not tell me the dangerous fascination of her low liquid voice, her half-playful, half-melancholy smile, and that bewitching walk, with all its stately grace, so that every fold as she moves sends its own thrill of ecstasy.

And now that I know all these, see and feel them, I am told that to me they can bring no hope! That I am too poor, too ignoble, too undistinguished, to raise my eyes to such attraction.