Love itself is without degrees--it is perfect--but when shall it see the perfect object?
It does see it, and it does not see it, in every beloved being.

Beverley found his mind turning, as on a pivot, round and round upon the thought that Alice might be impossible to him.

The mystery of her life seemed to force her below the line of his aristocratic vision, so that he could not fairly consider her, and yet with all his heart he loved her.

Alice, on the other hand, had her bookish ideal to reckon with, despite the fact that she daily dashed it contemptuously down.

She was different from Adrienne Bourcier, who bewailed the absence of her un-tamable lover; she wished that Beverley had not, as she somehow viewed it, weakly surrendered to Hamilton.