He liked the girl the better, in an amicable fashion, now that his nerves had got free of the transient spell of her kettle tone--the hardly varied one note of a heart boiling with sisterly devotion to a misused stranger of her sex;--and, after the way of his race, imagination sprang up in him, at the heels of the quieted senses, releasing him from the personal and physical to grasp the general situation and place the protagonist foremost.
He thought of Carinthia, with full vision of her.

Some wrong had been done, or some violation of the right, to guess from the girl Madge's molten words in avoidance of the very words.

It implied--though it might be but one of Love's shrewder discords--such suspected traitorous dealing of a man with their sister woman as makes the world of women all woman toward her.

They can be that, and their being so illuminates their hidden sentiments in relation to the mastering male, whom they uphold.
But our uninformed philosopher was merely picking up scraps of sheddings outside the dark wood of the mystery they were to him, and playing imagination upon them.

This primary element of his nature soon enthroned his chosen lady above their tangled obscurities.