I had been at fault so long) lurked here.
Though why she had chosen this tantalizing situation of an inaccessible
matron's form when so many others offered, it was beyond me to discover.
The whole affair ended innocently enough, when the lady left the town
with her husband and child: she seemed to regard our acquaintance as a
flirtation; yet it was anything but a flirtation for me!

* * *

'Why should I tell the rest of the tantalizing tale! After this, the
Well-Beloved put herself in evidence with greater and greater frequency,
and it would be impossible for me to give you details of her various
incarnations. She came nine times in the course of the two or three
ensuing years. Four times she masqueraded as a brunette, twice as a
pale-haired creature, and two or three times under a complexion neither
light nor dark. Sometimes she was a tall, fine girl, but more often, I
think, she preferred to slip into the skin of a lithe airy being, of no
great stature. I grew so accustomed to these exits and entrances that
I resigned myself to them quite passively, talked to her, kissed her,
corresponded with her, ached for her, in each of her several guises. So
it went on until a month ago. And then for the first time I was puzzled.
She either had, or she had not, entered the person of Avice Caro, a
young girl I had known from infancy. Upon the whole, I have decided
that, after all, she did not enter the form of Avice Caro, because I
retain so great a respect for her still.'

Pierston here gave in brief the history of his revived comradeship with
Avice, the verge of the engagement to which they had reached, and its
unexpected rupture by him, merely through his meeting with a woman into
whom the Well-Beloved unmistakably moved under his very eyes--by name
Miss Marcia Bencomb. He described their spontaneous decision to marry
offhand; and then he put it to Somers whether he ought to marry or
not--her or anybody else--in such circumstances.

'Certainly not,' said Somers. 'Though, if anybody, little Avice. But not
even her. You are like other men, only rather worse. Essentially, all
men are fickle, like you; but not with such perceptiveness.'

'Surely fickle is not the word? Fickleness means getting weary of a
thing while the thing remains the same. But I have always been faithful
to the elusive creature whom I have never been able to get a firm hold
of, unless I have done so now. And let me