more base than his coxcombry, he despised her because it was
he, Edwin, to whom she had taken a fancy. He had not sufficient
self-confidence to justify her fancy in his own eyes. His argument
actually was that no girl worth having could have taken a fancy to him
at sight. Thus he condemned her for her faith in him. As for his
historic remark about belief,--well, there might or might not be
something in that; perhaps there was something in it. One instant he
admired it, and the next he judged it glib and superficial. Moreover,
he had conceivably absorbed it from a book. But even if it were an
original epigrammatic pearl--was that an adequate reason for her
following him to an empty house at dead of night? Of course, an
overwhelming passion might justify such behaviour! He could recall
cases in literature... Yes, he had got so far as to envisage the
possibility of overwhelming passion... Then all these speculations
disconcertingly vanished, and Hilda presented herself to his mind as a
girl intensely religious, who would shrink from no unconventionality in
the pursuit of truth. He did not much care for this theory of Hilda,
nor did it convince him.

"Imagine marrying a girl like that!" he said to himself disdainfully.
And he made a catalogue of her defects of person and of character. She
was severe, satiric, merciless. "And I suppose--if I were to put my
finger up!" Thus ran on his despicable ideas. "Janet Orgreave, now!"
Janet had every quality that he could desire, that he could even think
of. Janet was balm.

"You needn't be afraid," that unpleasant girl had said. And he had only
been able to grin in reply!

Still, pride! Intense masculine pride!

There was one thing he had liked about her: that straightening of the
spine and setting back of the shoulders as she left him. She had in her
some tinge of the heroic.

He quitted the garden, and as soon as he was in the street he remembered
that he had not pulled-to the garden door of the house. "Dash the
confounded thing!" he exploded, returning. But he was not really
annoyed. He would not have been really annoyed even if he had had to
return from half-way down Trafalgar Road. Everything was a trifle save
that a girl had run after him under such romantic circumstances. The
circumstances were not strictly romantic, but they so seemed to him.

Going home, he did not meet a soul; only in the middle distance of one
of the lower side streets he esp