if needed, to nurse him in
illness, and would have rained rivers of tears on his grave. To do him
justice, he would have done almost as much for them,--for any of them.
He could torture a devoted heart, but only through a sort of half-wilful
unconsciousness; he could not bear to see tears shed in his presence,
nor to let his imagination dwell very much on those which flowed in his
absence. When he had once loved a woman, or even fancied that he loved
her, he built for her a shrine that was never dismantled, and in which
a very little faint incense would sometimes be found burning for years
after; he never quite ceased to feel a languid thrill at the mention
of her name; he would make even for a past love the most generous
sacrifices of time, convenience, truth perhaps,--everything, in short,
but the present love. To those who had given him all that an undivided
heart can give he would deny nothing but an undivided heart in return.
The misfortune was that this was the only thing they cared to possess.

This abundant and spontaneous feeling gave him an air of earnestness,
without which he could not have charmed any woman, and, least of all,
one like Hope. No woman really loves a trifler; she must at least
convince herself that he who trifles with others is serious with her.
Philip was never quite serious and never quite otherwise; he never
deliberately got up a passion, for it was never needful; he simply found
an object for his emotions, opened their valves, and then watched their
flow. To love a charming woman in her presence is no test of genuine
passion; let us know how much you long for her in absence. This longing
had never yet seriously troubled Malbone, provided there was another
charming person within an easy walk.

If it was sometimes forced upon him that all this ended in anguish to
some of these various charmers, first or last, then there was always in
reserve the pleasure of repentance. He was very winning and generous in
his repentances, and he enjoyed them so much they were often repeated.
He did not pass for a weak person, and he was not exactly weak; but he
spent his life in putting away temptations with one hand and pulling
them back with the other. There was for him something piquant in being
thus neither innocent nor guilty, but always on some delicious
middle ground. He loved dearly to skate on thin ice,--that was the
trouble,--especially where he fancied the water to be just within his
depth. Unluc