Nell would have been dazzled by Colonel Napier if she had not recently 
seen him strapped to a rack. Still, there was something about this very 
contradiction that made him, and by extension all Victorian men, fascinating to 
her. They lived a life of nearly perfect emotional denial—a form of 
asceticism as extreme as that of a medieval stylite. Yet they did have 
emotions, the same as anyone else, and only vented them in carefully selected 
circumstances.