d of such a thing, I should think it wicked to let you do it.
You're always fancying yourself doing something very devoted, but I've
never seen you ready to give up your own will, or your own comfort
even, in the slightest degree. And Dan Mavering, if he were twice as
temporising and circuitous"--the word came to her from her talk with
him--"would be twice too good for you. I'm going to breakfast."

XLIV.

The difficulty in life is to bring experience to the level of
expectation, to match our real emotions in view of any great occasion
with the ideal emotions which we have taught ourselves that we ought to
feel. This is all the truer when the occasion is tragical: we surprise
ourselves in a helplessness to which the great event, death, ruin,
lost love, reveals itself slowly, and at first wears the aspect of an
unbroken continuance of what has been, or at most of another incident in
the habitual sequence.

Dan Mavering came out into the bright winter morning knowing that
his engagement was broken, but feeling it so little that he could not
believe it. He failed to realise it, to seize it for a fact, and he
could not let it remain that dumb and formless wretchedness, without
proportion or dimensions, which it now seemed to be, weighing his life
down. To verify it, to begin to outlive it, he must instantly impart
it, he must tell it, he must see it with others' eyes. This was the
necessity of his youth and of his sympathy, which included himself
as well as the rest of the race in its activity. He had the usual
environment of a young man who has money. He belonged to clubs, and he
had a large acquaintance among men of his own age, who lived a life
of greater leisure; or were more absorbed in business, but whom he met
constantly in society. For one reason or another, or for no other reason
than that he was Dan Mavering and liked every one, he liked them all. He
thought himself great friends with them; he dined and lunched with them;
and they knew the Pasmers, and all about his engagement. But he did not
go to any of them now, with the need he felt to impart his calamity, to
get the support of come other's credence and opinion of it. He went to
a friend whom, in the way of his world, he met very seldom, but whom he
always found, as he said, just where he had left him.

Boardman never made any sign of suspecting that he was put on and off,
according to Dan's necessity or desire for comfort or congratulation;
but it w