s sort, social distinctions, which he had
once coveted so keenly, seemed to have no utility for him now. By the
accident of being a bachelor, he was floating in society without any
soul-anchorage or shrine that he could call his own; and, for want of
a domestic centre round which honours might crystallize, they dispersed
impalpably without accumulating and adding weight to his material
well-being.

He would have gone on working with his chisel with just as much zest if
his creations had been doomed to meet no mortal eye but his own. This
indifference to the popular reception of his dream-figures lent him a
curious artistic aplomb that carried him through the gusts of opinion
without suffering them to disturb his inherent bias.

The study of beauty was his only joy for years onward. In the streets he
would observe a face, or a fraction of a face, which seemed to express
to a hair's-breadth in mutable flesh what he was at that moment wishing
to express in durable shape. He would dodge and follow the owner like
a detective; in omnibus, in cab, in steam-boat, through crowds, into
shops, churches, theatres, public-houses, and slums--mostly, when at
close quarters, to be disappointed for his pains.

In these professional beauty-chases he sometimes cast his eye across
the Thames to the wharves on the south side, and to that particular
one whereat his father's tons of freestone were daily landed from the
ketches of the south coast. He could occasionally discern the white
blocks lying there, vast cubes so persistently nibbled by his parent
from his island rock in the English Channel, that it seemed as if in
time it would be nibbled all away.

One thing it passed him to understand: on what field of observation the
poets and philosophers based their assumption that the passion of love
was intensest in youth and burnt lower as maturity advanced. It was
possibly because of his utter domestic loneliness that, during
the productive interval which followed the first years of Marcia's
departure, when he was drifting along from five-and-twenty to
eight-and-thirty, Pierston occasionally loved with an ardour--though, it
is true, also with a self-control--unknown to him when he was green in
judgment.

* * *

His whimsical isle-bred fancy had grown to be such an emotion that the
Well-Beloved--now again visible--was always existing somewhere near him.
For months he would find her on the stage o