t North Hill seemed vague and misty. Thus his challenge came as
an experience both less and greater than love. It was less, in that no
such challenge can be so urgent and so mighty as the call of hungry
hearts to each other; it was greater, because the interests involved
were built on abiding principles. They arrested her intellectual
ambitions and pointed to a sphere of usefulness beyond her unaided
power. What must have made his prosaic offer flat in the ear of an
amorous woman, edged it for her. He had dwelt on the aspect of their
union that was likely most to attract her.

There was a pure personal side where love came in and made her heart
beat warmly enough; but, higher than that, she saw herself of living
value to Raymond and helping him just where he stood most in need of
help. She believed that they might well prove the complement of each
other in those duties, disciplines, and obligations to which life had
called them.

That night she went closely, searchingly over old ground again from the
new point of vision. What had always been interesting to her, became now
vital, since these characteristics belonged to the man who wanted to wed
her. She tried to be remorseless and cruel that she might be kind. But
the palette of thought was only set with pleasant colours. She had been
intellectually in love with him for a long time, and he had offered
problems which made her love him for the immense interest they gave her.
Now came additional stimulus in the knowledge that he loved her well
enough to share his life, his hopes, and his ambitions with her.

She believed they might be wedded in very earnest. He was masterful and
possessed self-assurance; but what man can lead and control without
these qualities? His self-assurance was less than his self-control, and
his instinct for self-assertion had nearly always been counted by a kind
heart. It seemed to her that she had never known a man who balanced
reason and feeling more judicially, or better preserved a mean between
them.

She had found that men could differentiate in a way beyond woman's power
and be unsociable if their duty demanded it. But to be unsociable is not
to be unsocial. Raymond took long views, and if his old, genial and
jolly attitude to life was a thing of the past, there had been
substituted for it a wiser understanding and saner recognition of the
useful and useless. Men did take longer views than women--so Estelle
decided: and there Raymond woul