had an opportunity to look back upon the
visit, its effect was rather encouraging than otherwise. For one thing,
it curiously made Guy more actual, because until the personality of his
father projected itself upon the scene of their love he had always
possessed for Pauline a kind of romantic unreality. In the Spring days
and Summer days which had seemed to dedicate themselves to the service
of intimacy, Guy had talked a great deal of his life before they met,
but the more he had told her, the more was she in the state of being
unable to realize that the central figure of these old tales was not a
dream. When he was with her, she was often in a daze of wonder at the
credibility of being loved like this; and there was never an occasion of
seeing him even after the briefest absence that did not hold in the
heart of its pleasure a surprise at his return. The appearance of Mr.
Hazlewood was a phenomenon that gave the pledge of prosaic authority to
her love, like a statement in print that, however absurd or
uncomfortable, has a value so far beyond mere talk. She had often been
made rather miserable by Guy's tales of the ladies he had loved with
airy heedlessness, but these heroines had all faded out in the unreality
of his life apart from her, and they took their place with days of
adventure described in Macedonia or with the old diversions of Oxford.
The visit of Mr. Hazlewood with the chilly disapproval it had shed was
more authentic than, for instance, the idea of Guy's dark-eyed mother,
who had seemed in his narrations almost to threaten Pauline with her
son's fairy ancestry, as if from the grave she might at any moment
summon him away. Mr. Hazlewood had carried with him a wonderful
assurance of ordinariness. The merely external resemblance between him
and his son proved that Guy could grow old; and the sense of his
opposition was a trifling discomfort in comparison with the assurance he
offered of an imaginable future. She remembered that her first idea of
Guy had been that of some one dry and cynical; and no doubt this first
impression of his father was equally wrong. She who had been so shy and
speechless was no doubt much to blame, and the family had done nothing
to help out the situation. It had been unkind of her father to hide
himself, since to Mr. Hazlewood, who could not have understood that it
was the sort of thing her father would be sure to do, such behavior must
have presented itself very oddly.

The Rector,