er mind to talk to him about it.
In reality, his objections had never had the same basis as hers, and he
would have given her as strong a support as ever, if she had asked for
it. But she held her peace, and he, absorbed in other things, took no
notice. Besides, he knew Langham too well. He had never been able to
take Catherine's alarms seriously.

An attentive onlooker, however, would have admitted that this time, at
any rate, they had their justification. Why Langham was so much in the
Leyburns' drawing-room during these winter months was a question that
several people asked--himself not least. He had not only pretended to
forget Rose Leyburn during the eighteen months which had passed since
their first acquaintance at Murewell--he had for all practical purposes
forgotten her. It is only a small proportion of men and women who are
capable of passion on the great scale at all; and certainly, as we have
tried to show, Langham was not among them. He had had a passing moment
of excitement at Murewell, soon put down, and followed by a week of
extremely pleasant sensations, which, like most of his pleasures, had
ended in reaction and self-abhorrence. He had left Murewell remorseful,
melancholy, and ill at ease, but conscious, certainly, of a great relief
that he and Rose Leyburn were not likely to meet again for long.

Then his settlement in London had absorbed him, as all such matters
absorb men who have become the slaves of their own solitary habits, and
in the joy of his new freedom, and the fresh zest for learning it had
aroused in him, the beautiful unmanageable child who had disturbed his
peace at Murewell was not likely to be more, but less, remembered. When
he stumbled across her unexpectedly in the National Gallery, his
determining impulse had been merely one of flight.

However, as he had written to Robert towards the beginning of his London
residence, there was no doubt that his migration had made him for the
time much more human, observant, and accessible. Oxford had become to
him an oppression and a nightmare, and as soon as he had turned his back
on it his mental lungs seemed once more to fill with air. He took his
modest part in the life of the capital; happy in the obscurity afforded
him by the crowd; rejoicing in the thought that his life and his affairs
were once more his own, and the academical yoke had been slipped for
ever.

It was in this mood of greater cheerfulness and energy that his fresh
sight