ung man who resolves to forego
unfair advantage in love.

The day after their arrival, when her father was making up for the sleep
he had lost by night, she found herself alone in the little reading-room
of the hotel with Burnamy for the first time, and she said: "I suppose
you must have been all over Weimar by this time."

"Well, I've been here, off and on, almost a month. It's an interesting
place. There's a good deal of the old literary quality left."

"And you enjoy that! I saw"--she added this with a little unnecessary
flush--"your poem in the paper you lent papa."

"I suppose I ought to have kept that back. But I couldn't." He laughed,
and she said:

"You must find a great deal of inspiration in such a literary place."

"It isn't lying about loose, exactly." Even in the serious and
perplexing situation in which he found himself he could not help being
amused with her unliterary notions of literature, her conventional and
commonplace conceptions of it. They had their value with him as those of
a more fashionable world than his own, which he believed was somehow a
greater world. At the same time he believed that she was now interposing
them between the present and the past, and forbidding with them any
return to the mood of their last meeting in Carlsbad. He looked at her
ladylike composure and unconsciousness, and wondered if she could be the
same person and the same person as they who lost themselves in the crowd
that night and heard and said words palpitant with fate. Perhaps there
had been no such words; perhaps it was all a hallucination. He must
leave her to recognize that it was reality; till she did so, he felt
bitterly that there was nothing for him but submission and patience; if
she never did so, there was nothing for him but acquiescence.

In this talk and in the talks they had afterwards she seemed willing
enough to speak of what had happened since: of coming on to Wurzburg
with the Addings and of finding the Marches there; of Rose's collapse,
and of his mother's flight seaward with him in the care of Kenby, who
was so fortunately going to Holland, too. He on his side told her of
going to Wurzburg for the manoeuvres, and they agreed that it was very
strange they had not met.

She did not try to keep their relations from taking the domestic
character which was inevitable, and it seemed to him that this in itself
was significant of a determination on her part that was fatal to his
hopes. With a l