.

The morning after the storm Wentworth was sitting in the library at
Barford, looking out across the garden to the down. Behind the down lay
Priesthope, where Fay was.

He was thinking of her. This shewed a frightful lapse in his regulated
existence. So far he had allowed the remembrance of Fay to invade him
only in the evenings over his cigarette, or when he was pacing amid his
purpling beeches.

Was she now actually beginning to invade his mornings, those mornings
sacred to the history of Sussex? No! No! Dismiss the extravagant
surmise. Wentworth was far more interested in his attitude towards a
thing or person--in what he called his point of view--than in the thing
viewed.

He was distinctly attracted by Fay, but he was more occupied with his
feelings about her than with herself. It was these which were now
engrossing him.

For some time past he had been working underground--digging out the
foundations--and as a rule invisible as a mole within them--of a tedious
courtship undertaken under the sustaining conviction that marriage is
much more important to a woman than to a man. This point of view was not
to be wondered at, for Wentworth, like many other eligible, suspiciously
diffident men, had so far come into contact mainly with that large
battalion of women who forage for themselves, and who take upon
themselves with assiduity the work of acquaintanceship and courtship. He
had never quite liked their attentions or been deceived by their "chance
meetings." But his conclusions respecting the whole sex had been formed
by the conduct of the female skirmishers who had thrown themselves
across his path; and he, in common with many other secluded masculine
violets, innocently supposed that he was irresistible to the other sex;
and that when he met the _right_ woman she would set to work like the
others, only with a little more tact, and the marriage would be
conveniently arrived at.

But Fay showed no signs of setting to work, no alacrity, no apparent
grasp of the situation: I mean of the possible but by no means certain
turn which affairs might one day take.

At first Wentworth was incredulous, but he remembered in time that one
of the tactics of women is to retreat in order to lure on a further
masculine advance. Then he became offended, stiff with injured dignity,
almost anxious. But he communed with himself, analysed his feelings
under various headings, and discovered that he was not discouraged. He
was a