But as to any other failure, it was
certainly tacit, and it still rested with him to give it effect. He could
go back to Dryfoos's house, as freely as before, and it was clear that he
was very much desired to come back. But if he went back it was also clear
that he must go back with intentions more explicit than before, and now
he had to ask himself just how much or how little he had meant by going
there. His liking for Christine had certainly not increased, but the
charm, on the other hand, of holding a leopardess in leash had not yet
palled upon him. In his life of inconstancies, it was a pleasure to rest
upon something fixed, and the man who had no control over himself liked
logically enough to feel his control of some one else. The fact cannot
other wise be put in terms, and the attraction which Christine Dryfoos
had for him, apart from this, escapes from all terms, as anything purely
and merely passional must. He had seen from the first that she was a cat,
and so far as youth forecasts such things, he felt that she would be a
shrew. But he had a perverse sense of her beauty, and he knew a sort of
life in which her power to molest him with her temper could be reduced to
the smallest proportions, and even broken to pieces.
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