The Marchesa bent her cheek on her hand in silence. To her, marriage was more than it usually seems to dreaming maiden or to disconsolate widow. So had the strong desire to escape from the control of her unprincipled and remorseless brother grown a part of her very soul--so had whatever was best and highest in her very mixed and complex character been galled and outraged by her friendless and exposed position, the equivocal worship rendered to her beauty, the various debasements to which pecuniary embarrassments had subjected her--not without design on the part of the Count, who though grasping, was not miserly, and who by precarious and seemingly capricious gifts at one time, and refusals of all aid at another, had involved her in debt in order to retain his hold on her--so utterly painful and humiliating to a woman of her pride and her birth was the station that she held in the world--that in marriage she saw liberty, life, honor, self-redemption; and these thoughts while they compelled her to co-operate with the schemes by which the Count, on securing to himself a bride, was to bestow on herself a dower, also disposed her now to receive with favor Randal Leslie's pleadings on behalf of his friend.
The advocate saw that he had made an impression, and with the marvelous skill which his knowledge of those natures that engaged his study bestowed on his intelligence, he continued to improve his cause by such representations as were likely to be most effective. With what admirable tact he avoided panegyric of Frank as the mere individual, and drew him rather as the type, the ideal of what a woman in Beatrice's position might desire in the safety, peace, and honor of a home, in the trust and constancy, and honest confiding love of its partner! He did not paint an elysium; he described a haven; he did not glowingly delineate a hero of romance--he soberly portrayed that representative of the Respectable and the Real which a woman turns to when romance begins to seem to her but delusion. Verily, if you could have looked into the heart of the person he addressed, and heard him speak, you would have cried admiringly, "Knowledge _is_ power; and this man, if as able on a larger field of action, should play no mean part in the history of his time."