Nature had afflicted him with a certain weakness.

One man has a hump;--another can hardly see out of his imperfect eyes;--a third can barely utter a few disjointed words.
It was his fate to be constructed with some weak arrangement of the blood-vessels which left him in this plight.

"The whole damned thing is nothing to me," he said bursting out into absolute tears, after vainly trying to reassure himself by a recollection of the good things which the world still had in store for him.
Then he strove to console himself by thinking that he might take a pride in his love even though it were so intolerable a burden to him.

Was it not something to be able to love as he loved?
Was it not something at any rate that she to whom he had condescended to stoop was worthy of all love?
But even here he could get no comfort,--being in truth unable to see very clearly into the condition of the thing.
It was a disgrace to him,--to him within his own bosom,--that she should have preferred to him such a one as Ferdinand Lopez, and this disgrace he exaggerated, ignoring the fact that the girl herself might be deficient in judgment, or led away in her love by falsehood and counterfeit attractions.

To him she was such a goddess that she must be right,--and therefore his own inferiority to such a one as Ferdinand Lopez was proved.