It was the quick, sharp, cruel blow, the _coup de poignard_, that beauty
of the most obvious, yet subtle, consummate, and highly-organized order
can deal to a thoroughly prepared victim.
And what a thoroughly prepared victim was I! A poor, shy,
over-susceptible, virginal savage--Uncas, the son of Chingachgook,
astray for the first time in a fashionable London drawing-room.
A chaste mediaeval knight, born out of his due time, ascetic both from
reverence and disgust, to whom woman in the abstract was the one
religion; in the concrete, the cause of fifty disenchantments a day!
A lusty, love-famished, warm-blooded pagan, stranded in the middle of
the nineteenth century; in whom some strange inherited instinct had
planted a definite, complete, and elaborately-finished conception of
what the ever-beloved shape of woman should be--from the way the hair
should grow on her brow and her temples and the nape of her neck, down
to the very rhythm that should regulate the length and curve and
position of every single individual toe! and who had found, to his pride
and delight, that his preconceived ideal was as near to that of Phidias
as if he had lived in the time of Pericles and Aspasia.
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