the Front, three days after
having been introduced to him, he "cut him dead"--another privileged
consequence of a social relation--rather than seem to himself to make
the remotest approach to the question of whether Miss Cookham had left
Properley. He had cut people in the days of his life before, just as
he had come to being himself cut--since there had been no time for
him wholly without one or other face of that necessity--but had never
effected such a severance as of this rare connection, which helped to
give him thus the measure of his really precious sincerity. If he had
lost what had hovered before him he had lost it, his only tribute to
which proposition was to grind his teeth with one of those "scrunches,"
as he would have said, of which the violence fairly reached his ear. It
wouldn't make him lift a finger, and in fact if Kate had simply
taken herself off on the Tuesday or the Wednesday she would have been
reabsorbed again into the darkness from which she had emerged--and
no lifting of fingers, the unspeakable chapter closed, would evermore
avail. That at any rate was the kind of man he still was--even after all
that had come and gone, and even if for a few dazed hours certain things
had seemed pleasant. The dazed hours had passed, the surge of the old
bitterness had dished him (shouldn't he have been shamed if it hadn't?),
and he might sit there as before, as always, with nothing at all on
earth to look to. He had therefore wrongfully believed himself to be
degraded; and the last word about him would be that he _couldn't_ then,
it appeared, sink to vulgarity as he had tried to let his miseries make
him.

And yet on the next Sunday morning, face to face with him again at the
Land's End, what she very soon came to was: "As if I believed you didn't
_know_ by what cord you hold me!" Absolutely too, and just that morning
in fact, above all, he wouldn't, he quite couldn't have taken his solemn
oath that he hadn't a sneaking remnant, as he might have put it to
himself--a remnant of faith in tremendous things still to come of their
interview. The day was sunny and breezy, the sea of a cold purple; he
wouldn't go to church as he mostly went of Sunday mornings, that being
in its way too a social relation--and not least when two-and-thruppenny
tan-coloured gloves were new; which indeed he had the art of keeping
them for ages. Yet he would dress himself as he scarce mustered
resources for even to figure on the fringe o