What woman of thirty, with aspirations for the infinite, could resist an attack like this?
What woman with a soul could see before her the most powerful public man of her time, appealing--with a face furrowed by anxieties, and a voice vibrating with only half-suppressed affection--to her for counsel and sympathy, without yielding some response?
and what woman could have helped bowing her head to that rebuke of her over-confident judgment, coming as it did from one who in the same breath appealed to that judgment as final?
Ratcliffe, too, had a curious instinct for human weaknesses.

No magnetic needle was ever truer than his finger when he touched the vulnerable spot in an opponent's mind.

Mrs.Lee was not to be reached by an appeal to religious sentiment, to ambition, or to affection.
Any such appeal would have fallen flat on her ears and destroyed its own hopes.

But she was a woman to the very last drop of her blood.

She could not be induced to love Ratcliffe, but she might be deluded into sacrificing herself for him.