thing deeper and
sweeter than any thing she had ever known, close at hand, something to
put all the world into proportion for her.

In a little while she no longer merely tampered with these seals, for
quite silently the door had opened and she was craning in. This love it
seemed to her might after all be so strange a thing that it goes
unsuspected and yet fills the whole world of a human soul. An odd
grotesque passage in a novel by Wilkins gave her that idea. He compared
love to electricity, of all things in the world; that throbbing life
amidst the atoms that we now draw upon for light, warmth, connexion, the
satisfaction of a thousand wants and the cure of a thousand ills. There
it is and always has been in the life of man, and yet until a century
ago it worked unsuspected, was known only for a disregarded oddity of
amber, a crackling in frost-dry hair and thunder....

And then she remembered how Mr. Brumley had once broken into a panegyric
of love. "It makes life a different thing. It is like the home-coming of
something lost. All this dispersed perplexing world _centres_. Think
what true love means; to live always in the mind of another and to have
that other living always in your mind.... Only there can be no
restraints, no reserves, no admission of prior rights. One must feel
_safe_ of one's welcome and freedoms...."

Wasn't it worth the risk of almost any breach of boundaries to get to
such a light as that?...

She hid these musings from every human being, she was so shy with them,
she hid them almost from herself. Rarely did they have their way with
her and when they did, presently she would accuse herself of slackness
and dismiss them and urge herself to fresh practicalities in her work.
But her work was not always at hand, Sir Isaac's frequent relapses took
her abroad to places where she found herself in the midst of beautiful
scenery with little to do and little to distract her from these
questionings. Then such thoughts would inundate her.

This feeling of the unsatisfactoriness of life, of incompleteness and
solitariness, was not of that fixed sort that definitely indicates its
demand. Under its oppression she tried the idea of love, but she also
tried certain other ideas. Very often this vague appeal had the quality
of a person, sometimes a person shrouded in night, a soundless whisper,
the unseen lover who came to Psyche in the darkness. And sometimes that
person became more distinct, less mystic an