It was a traitorous return, but a very natural one.

And she, sweet creature! walked straight into the pleasant snare, utterly blind, because she fancied that she saw clearly.

In the pride of her mysticism, she had fancied herself above so commonplace a passion as love.

It was a curious feature of lower humanity, which she might investigate and analyse harmlessly as a cold scientific spectator; and, in her mingled pride and purity, she used to indulge Lancelot in metaphysical disquisitions about love and beauty, like that first one in their walk home from Minchampstead, from which a less celestially innocent soul would have shrunk.

She thought, forsooth, as the old proverb says, that she could deal in honey, without putting her hand to her mouth.