The first is love, downright love, on the part of this young girl, for the poor little misshapen man.

You may laugh, if you like.

But women are apt to love the men who they think have the largest capacity of loving;--and who can love like one that has thirsted all his life long for the smile of youth and beauty, and seen it fly his presence as the wave ebbed from the parched lips of him whose fabled punishment is the perpetual type of human longing and disappointment?
What would become of him, if this fresh soul should stoop upon him in her first young passion, as the flamingo drops out of the sky upon some lonely and dark lagoon in the marshes of Cagliari, with a flutter of scarlet feathers and a kindling of strange fires in the shadowy waters that hold her burning image?
-- Marry her, of course ?--Why, no, not of course.

I should think the chance less, on the whole, that he would be willing to marry her than she to marry him.
There is one other thing that might happen.

If the interest he awakes in her gets to be a deep one, and yet has nothing of love in it, she will glance off from him into some great passion or other.