Then she drew her cloak together, and went to the door again.
"Oh," said Lot Gordon, weakly, in his hoarse voice, "the hardest thing in the whole world for Love to bruise himself against is the tender heart of a woman, when 'tis not inclined his way." "Good-bye," said Madelon, and shut the door behind her fiercely.

That last speech of Lot's, which, like many of his speeches, seemed to her no human vernacular, added terror to her aversion of him.

"He's more like a book than a man," she had often thought, and the fancy seized her now that the great leather-bound book upon his knees, and all those leather-bound books against his walls, had somehow possessed him with an uncanny life of their own.
And she may have been in a measure right, for Lot Gordon, during his whole life, had dealt indirectly with human hearts through their translations in his beloved books rather than with the beating hearts of men and women around him.

Still, although he spoke like one who learns a language from books instead of the familiar converse of people, and his thoughts clothed themselves in images which those about him disdained and threw off as impeding their hard race of life, poor Lot Gordon's heart beat in time with the hearts of his kind.

But that Madelon could not know because hers was so set against it.
She hurried out of the house and the yard, dreading again lest she should encounter Burr.