I must have it. You alone can give it to me. You are kind,
thoughtful, conscientious, high-minded, cultivated, fitted better
than any woman I ever saw, for public duties. Your place is there.
You belong among those who exercise an influence beyond their
time. I only ask you to take the place which is yours."
This desperate appeal to Mrs. Lee's ambition was a calculated part
of Ratcliffe's scheme. He was well aware that he had marked high
game, and that in proportion to this height must be the power of
his lure. Nor was he embarrassed because Mrs. Lee sat still and
pale with her eyes fixed on the ground and her hands twisted
together in her lap. The eagle that soars highest must be longer in
descending to the ground than the sparrow or the partridge. Mrs.
Lee had a thousand things to think about in this brief time, and yet
she found that she could not think at all; a succession of mere
images and fragments of thought passed rapidly over her mind,
and her will exercised no control upon their order or their nature.
One of these fleeting reflections was that in all the offers of
marriage she had ever heard, this was the most unsentimental and
businesslike. As for his appeal to her ambition, it fell quite dead
upon her ear, but a woman must be more than a heroine who can
listen to flattery so evidently sincere, from a man who is
pre-eminent among men, without being affected by it. To her,
however, the great and overpowering fact was that she found
herself unable to retreat or escape; her tactics were disconcerted,
her temporary barriers beaten down.
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