Yet thereby, through that very excitement, she recaptured for
the time being the physical loveliness of an earlier period. Beauty is
very much a matter of circulation; and the blood cantered, not to say
galloped, through Henrietta's veins.
The sight of Charles Verity did indeed put back the clock for her in
most astounding sort. Henrietta was no victim of impulse. Each of her
three marriages had been dictated by convenience, carefully thought out
and calculated. Over neither husband had she, for ever so brief a
period, lost her head. But over Charles Verity she had come perilously
near losing it--once. That, it is not too much to say, constituted the
greatest sensation, the greatest emotion of her experience. As a rule
the most trying and embarrassing part of encountering a former lover is
that you wonder what, under Heaven, induced you to like him so well?
Here the position was reversed, so that Henrietta wondered--with a
sickening little contraction of the heart--what, under Heaven, had
prevented her liking him much more, why, under Heaven, she ever let him
go? Of course, as things turned out, it was all for the best, since her
insensibility made for righteousness, or anyhow for respectability--in
the opinion of the world the same, if not an even superior article.
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