at
any rate, they had their justification. Why Langham was so much in the
Leyburns' drawing-room during these winter months, was a question that
several people asked--himself not least. He had not only pretended to
forget Rose Leyburn during the eighteen months which had passed since
their first acquaintance at Murewell--he had for all practical purposes
forgotten her. It is only a small proportion of men and women who are
capable of passion on the great scale at all; and certainly, as we have
tried to show, Langham was not among them. He had had a passing moment
of excitement at Murewell, soon put down, and followed by a week of
extremely pleasant sensations, which, like most of his pleasures, had
ended in reaction and self-abhorrence. He had left Murewell remorseful,
melancholy, and ill-at-ease, but conscious, certainly, of a great relief
that he and Rose Leyburn were not likely to meet again for long.

Then his settlement in London had absorbed him, as all such matters
absorb men who have become the slaves of their own solitary habits, and
in the joy of his new freedom, and the fresh zest for learning it had
aroused in him, the beautiful unmanageable child who had disturbed his
peace at Murewell was not likely to be more, but less remembered.
When he stumbled across her unexpectedly in the National Gallery, his
determining impulse had been merely one of flight.

However, as he had written to Robert toward the beginning of his London
residence, there was no doubt that his migration had made him for the
time much more human, observant, and accessible. Oxford had become to
him an oppression and a nightmare and as soon as he had turned his back
on it, his mental lungs seemed once more to fill with air. He took his
modest part in the life of the capital; happy in the obscurity afforded
him by the crowd; rejoicing in the thought that his life and his affairs
were once more his own, and the academical yoke had been slipped for
ever.

It was in this mood of greater cheerfulness and energy that his fresh
sight of Rose found him. For the moment, he was perhaps more susceptible
than he ever could have been before to her young perfections, her
beauty, her brilliancy, her provoking, stimulating ways. Certainly, from
that first afternoon onward he became more and more restless to watch
her, to be near her, to see what she made of herself and her gifts. In
general, though it was certainly owing to her that he came so much, she
t