Doctor Claudius by F. Marion Crawford

It is not to be supposed that a man of Barker's character would neglect the signal advantage he had gained in being injured, or at least badly bruised, while attempting to save Margaret from destruction. That he had really saved her was a less point in his favour than that he had barked his shins in so doing. The proverbial relationship between pity and love is so exceedingly well known that many professional love-makers systematically begin their campaigns by endeavouring to move the compassion of the woman they are attacking. Occasionally they find a woman with whom pity is akin to scorn instead of to love -- and then their policy is a failure.

The dark Countess was no soft-hearted Saxon maiden, any more than she was a cold-blooded, cut-throat American girl, calculating her romance by the yard, booking her flirtations by double-entry and marrying at compound interest, with the head of a railway president and the heart of an Esquimaux. She was rather one of those women who are ever ready to sympathise from a naturally generous and noble nature, but who rarely give their friendship and still more seldom their love. They marry, sometimes, where there is neither. They marry -- ye gods! why do people marry, and what reasons will they not find for marrying? But such women, if they are wedded where their heart is not, are generally very young; far too young to know what they are doing; and though there be little inclination to the step, it always turns out that they had at least a respect for the man.