 | | He condescended to take my trembling match and turned away without uttering one syllable of thanks. Had I been a paper matchbox he could not have treated me with less
[sic]
indifference.
|
| | My admiration of his haughtiness was boundless. I felt that I had not lived in vain. The one word, the one moment had attoned
[sic]
for the draining of a cup of bitterness that was forever brimming over.
|
Although it seems quite likely that in reality the episode had ended here, in embellishing the tale for Howells, Stoddard added an improbable plot reversal and an obscure moral:
|
| | A second term was drawing to a close. I was still unnoticed; yet all this time I would have dragged myself at the wheels of his chariothad he only given me the chance. In the last pathetic moments of commencement-daywhen every heart was in its unaccustomed throatsuddenly the Match-King turned upon meupon
me,
his abject slaveand protested love of me; and would have me pass my vacation at his Palace; and sit upon his right hand, that he might make mine enemies my footstool; other unspeakable attractions were offered too numerous to mention.
|
| | What did thy servant? With one momentary, far away glance that did not admit him or the likes of him within its range, I dismissed his overtures with a wave of my hand as something impossibly presumptuous, and soared away.
|
| | The spell was broken. My hour of deliverance had come. At that moment moment
[sic]
he crumbled before mea creature of the commonest clayand on the hights
[sic]
of Olympus there was loud laughter among the Gods.
|
| | Moral: We are ever human even if we seem divine.
11
|
"The Spell-binder" describes the sort of relationship that Stoddard often sought and usually suffered through. Moreover, its self-deprecating subtitle"one of the reasons why I should be despised and rejected"abounds in implications for homosexual identity in the nineteenth century.
|
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