d to give him pleasure. He
found his friend's wife middle-class, self-absorbed, and artificial, the
friend himself donnish, cut and dried, and liable to anecdotic seizures
of increasing frequency. The intimacy dwindled and was now moribund. But
it never entered his mind to enquire into the whereabouts of the sister,
and to continue his acquaintance with her independently. If he had
continued to meet her regularly he would almost certainly have married
her. She on her side seemed well disposed towards him. As it was he
never saw her again. He gradually ceased to think of her, except on
summer evenings, as a charming possibility which Fate had sternly
removed, as one lost to him for ever. He wrote a little poem about her,
beginning, "Where are you now?" (She was at Kensington all the time.)
Wentworth never published his verses. He said there was no room for a
new poet who did not advertise himself. There had been room for one of
his college friends, but that had been a case of log rolling.

I do not know whether it was a fortunate or an unfortunate fate that had
prevented the gay little lady of the pink cheeks from being at that
moment installed at Barford as the wife of a poet who scorned publicity.

If Wentworth had been riding home to his wife on that February evening
he would not have taken unconsciously another of the many steps which
entailed so many more, by saying to himself, thinking of Fay:

"Could a woman like that love a second time?"

Then he hastened his speed as he remembered that his old friend the
Bishop of Lostford had by this time arrived at Barford.

CHAPTER XI

If you feel no love, sit still; occupy yourself with things,
with yourself, with anything you like, only not with men.

--TOLSTOY.

In Wentworth's youth he had been attracted towards many, besides the
Bishop, among the bolder and less conventional of his contemporaries.
Their fire, their energies, their enthusiasm, warmed his somewhat
under-vitalized nature. He regarded himself as one of them, and his
refinement and distinction drew the robuster spirits towards himself.
But gradually, as time went on, these energies and enthusiasm took form,
and, alas! took forms which he had not expected--he never expected
anything--and from which his mind instinctively recoiled. He had
supposed that energy was energy. He had not realised that it was life in
embryo, that might develop, not always on lines of beauty, into a new
poli