thing to do with it? Certainly not: he had thought her at that time a
rather conceited child.

Knight's experience was a complete disproof of the assumption that
love always comes by glances of the eye and sympathetic touches of the
fingers: that, like flame, it makes itself palpable at the moment of
generation. Not till they were parted, and she had become sublimated in
his memory, could he be said to have even attentively regarded her.

Thus, having passively gathered up images of her which his mind did not
act upon till the cause of them was no longer before him, he appeared
to himself to have fallen in love with her soul, which had temporarily
assumed its disembodiment to accompany him on his way.

She began to rule him so imperiously now that, accustomed to analysis,
he almost trembled at the possible result of the introduction of this
new force among the nicely adjusted ones of his ordinary life. He became
restless: then he forgot all collateral subjects in the pleasure of
thinking about her.

Yet it must be said that Knight loved philosophically rather than with
romance.

He thought of her manner towards him. Simplicity verges on coquetry. Was
she flirting? he said to himself. No forcible translation of favour into
suspicion was able to uphold such a theory. The performance had been
too well done to be anything but real. It had the defects without which
nothing is genuine. No actress of twenty years' standing, no bald-necked
lady whose earliest season 'out' was lost in the discreet mist of
evasive talk, could have played before him the part of ingenuous girl
as Elfride lived it. She had the little artful ways which partly make up
ingenuousness.

There are bachelors by nature and bachelors by circumstance: spinsters
there doubtless are also of both kinds, though some think only those
of the latter. However, Knight had been looked upon as a bachelor by
nature. What was he coming to? It was very odd to himself to look at his
theories on the subject of love, and reading them now by the full light
of a new experience, to see how much more his sentences meant than he
had felt them to mean when they were written. People often discover the
real force of a trite old maxim only when it is thrust upon them by a
chance adventure; but Knight had never before known the case of a man
who learnt the full compass of his own epigrams by such means.

He was intensely satisfied with one aspect of the affair. Inbred in him
wa