His
adolescent soul was not closed to any of the thousand bashful
emotions by which a young man is a being apart, whose heart
abounds in joys, in poetry, in virginal hopes, puerile in the
eyes of men of the world, but deep because they are
single-hearted.
He was endowed with the gentle and polite manners which speak to
the soul, and fascinate even those who do not understand them. He
was well made. His voice, coming from his heart, stirred that of
others to noble sentiments, and bore witness to his true modesty
by a certain ingenuousness of tone. Those who saw him felt drawn
to him by that attraction of the moral nature which men of
science are happily unable to analyze; they would detect in it
some phenomenon of galvanism, or the current of I know not what
fluid, and express our sentiments in a formula of ratios of
oxygen and electricity.
These details will perhaps explain to strong-minded persons and
to men of fashion why, in the absence of the porter whom he had
sent to the end of the Rue de la Madeleine to call him a coach,
Hippolyte Schinner did not ask the man's wife any questions
concerning the two women whose kindness of heart had shown itself
in his behalf. But though he replied Yes or No to the inquiries,
natural under the circumstances, which the good woman made as to
his accident, and the friendly intervention of the tenants
occupying the fourth floor, he could not hinder her from
following the instinct of her kind; she mentioned the two
strangers, speaking of them as prompted by the interests of her
policy and the subterranean opinions of the porter's lodge.
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