at it isn't exactly easy. But I will wait
as you ask me. When you are quite sure--you will let me go?"

"Yes," he said.

Neither of them looked at the other.

Does Jove indeed laugh at lover's perjuries? Even more at their
stupidities, perhaps!

CHAPTER XXXII

For they really were stupid! Looking on, we can see so plainly what
they should have seen, and didn't.

If thoughts are things (and Professor Spence continues to argue that
they are) a mistaken thought is quite as powerful a reality as the
other kind. Only let it be conceived with sufficient force and
nourished by continual attention and it will grow into a veritable
highwayman of the mind--a thievish tyrant of one's mental roads,
holding their more legitimate travellers at the stand and deliver.

Desire, usually so clearsighted, ought to have seen that the attentions
of Benis to the too-sympathetic Mary were hollow at the core. But this,
her mistaken Thought would by no means allow. Ceaselessly on the watch,
it leapt upon every unprejudiced deduction and turned it to the
strengthening of its own mistaken self. What might have seemed merely
boredom on the professor's part was twisted by the Thought to appear an
anguished effort after self-control. Any avoidance of Mary's society
was attributed to fear rather than to indifference. And so on and so on.

Spence, too, a man learned in the byways of the mind, ought to have
known that, to Desire, John was a refuge merely, and Mary the real lion
in the way. But his mistaken Thought, born of a smile and a photograph,
grew steadily stronger and waxed fat upon the everyday trivialities
which should have slain it. So powerful had it become that, by the time
of Desire's arrival on the veranda, it had closed every road of
interpretation save its own.

Nor was John in more reasonable case. His mistaken Thought was
different in action but equally successful in effect. Born of an
insistent desire, and nursed by half fearful hope, it stood a beggar at
the door of life, snatching from every passing circumstance the crumbs
by which it lived. Did Desire smile--how eagerly John's famished
Thought would claim it for his own. Did she frown--how quick it was to
find some foreign cause for frowning. And, as Desire woke to love under
his eyes, how ceaselessly it worked to add belief to hope. How
plausibly it reasoned, how cleverly it justified! That Spence loved his
wife, the Thought would not accept as possible. All John'