een herself with him again, he had not
known, bad as the last two days had been, how deeply and intimately he
missed her friendship. That, even that, merely her frank and friendly
intercourse, had become wine to him; he thirsted and longed for it, and
even it, now that it was restored to him, mounted to his head with a
sort of psychic intoxication. Yet that was but the gift she had for the
whole world of her friends; what if there was something for him behind
all that, which should be his alone, and not the world's--something to
which this wine was but as water?

At dinner this had been but the side she showed to all the world, but
there was better coming. She had promised him a talk that night, and by
that he knew well she did not mean just the intercourse of dinner-talk,
which all the table might share in, but a talk like those they had had
before by the roadside when the motor broke down, or in the punt while
the thunderstorm mounted in hard-edged, coppery clouds up the sky. The
last thing they had spoken of then was friendship, and he had told her,
he remembered, how he hoped to settle down and marry. He hoped that she
would of her own accord speak of friendship again; that would be a
thing of good omen, for again, as before, he would speak of his hope of
settling down and marrying. Only he would speak of it differently now.

For him the hour had struck; there was no choice of deliberation
possible any more to him. He did not look on the picture of quiet
domesticity any more, and find it pleasing; he did not look on himself,
count up his years, and settle, with a content that had just one grain
of resignation in it, that it was time for him to make what is called a
home. He looked at Jeannie, and from the ocean of love a billow came,
bore him off his feet, and took him seawards. She, the beauty of her
face, the soft curves of her neck, the grace and suppleness of her body,
were no longer, as had been the case till now, the whole of the woman
whom he loved. Now they were but the material part of her; he believed
and knew that he loved something that was more essentially Jeannie than
these--he loved her soul and spirit.

Late this love had come to him, for all his life he had stifled its
possibility of growth by being content with what was more material; but
at last it had dawned on him, and he stood now on the threshold of a
world that was as new as it was bewildering. Yet, for all its
bewilderment, he saw at a gla