"Distasteful! and like you again! I think I shall like you again, and yet again: and I will make you confess I do not only like, but love you--with truth, fervour, constancy."

     "Yet are you not capricious, sir?"

     "To women who please me only by their faces, I am the very devil when I find out they have neither souls nor hearts--when they open to me a perspective of flatness, triviality, and perhaps imbecility, coarseness, and ill-temper: but to the clear eye and eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break--at once supple and stable, tractable and consistent--I am ever tender and true."

     "Had you ever experience of such a character, sir? Did you ever love such an one?"

     "I love it now."

     "But before me: if I, indeed, in any respect come up to your difficult standard?"