to
the one we love. We need not trouble ourselves to seek for such an
occasion, for though many things fail us in this life the opportunity so
to act has never yet failed to arrive, and has never arrived alone,
always hand in hand with some prosaic hideously difficult circumstance,
which, if we are of an artistic temperament, may appear to us too ugly.

Wentworth had never wished to do anything for the gay little lady who, a
few years ago, had crossed his path. The principal subject of his
cogitations about her had been whether she would be able to adapt
herself to him and his habits, to understand his many-sided wayward
nature, and to add permanently to his happiness; or whether, on the
contrary, she might not prove a bar to his love of solitude, a drag on
his soaring spirit. So I think we may safely conclude that his feelings
for her had not gone to breakneck length. But the germ in his mind of
compassionate protection and instinctive desire to help Fay had in it
the possibility of growth, of some expansion. And what other feeling in
Wentworth's clean, well-regulated, sterilized mind had shown any power
of growth?

The worst of growth is that a small acorn does not grow into a large
acorn as logical persons expect. It ought to, but it does not. It grows
instead into something quite unrecognisable from its small beginnings,
something for which, perhaps, beyond a certain stage, there is no
room,--not even a manger.

Those who love must discard much. Wentworth had not yet felt the need of
discarding anything, and he had not the smallest intention of doing so.
He intended instead to make a small ornamental addition, a sort of
portico, to his life. His mind had got itself made up this afternoon,
and he contemplated the proposed addition with some complacency as
already made.

There is, I believe, a method of planting an acorn in a bottle,
productive of the happiest results--for those who love small results.
You only give the acorn a little water every day,--no soil of course.
The poor thing will push up a thin twig of stem through the bottle neck,
and in time will unfold a few real oak leaves. Men like Wentworth would
always prefer the acorn to remain an acorn, but if it shews signs of
growth, some of them are wise enough, take alarm early enough, to
squeeze it quickly down a bottle neck before it has expanded too much to
resist the passage.

Had Fate in store for Wentworth a kinder, sterner destiny than that, or
w