But after Singapore she found herself enduing them with the characteristics of the heroes in the novels she had just read for the first time.

This one was Henry Esmond, that one the melancholy Marius, and so forth and so on; never any villains.

It wasn't worth while to invest imaginatively a man with evil projects simply because he was physically ugly.
Some day she wanted to be loved as Marius loved Cosette; but there was another character which bit far more deeply into her mind.

Why?
Because she knew him in life, because, so long as she could remember, he had crossed and recrossed her vision--Sidney Carton.
The wastrel, the ne'er-do-well, who went mostly nobly to a fine end.
Here, then, but for the time and place, might be another Sidney Carton.

Given the proper incentive, who could say that he might not likewise go nobly to some fine end?
She thrilled.