sence, would have been
in her eyes a desert; and that any grouping of mountains or arrangement
of buildings could offer the slightest temptation beside the promised
month in the Adirondacks appeared to her as entirely beyond the
question. If the truth were told he did immeasurably prefer the prospect
of a summer spent by her side, but he felt at the same time--though he
hardly admitted this even to himself--that in remaining in America he
was giving up a good deal of his ordinary physical enjoyments. It was
not that he wanted in the very least to go; he felt merely that he ought
to have been seriously commended because he stayed away. Since he had
never relinquished so much as a day's pleasure for any woman in the
past, he was almost overcome by appreciation of his present generosity.

For a time the very virtue in his decision produced in him the agreeable
humour which succeeds any particular admiration for one's own conduct.
Of all states of mind the complacent suavity resulting from self-esteem
is, perhaps, the most pleasantly apparent in one's attitude to others;
and no sooner had Kemper assured himself that he had made an unusual
sacrifice for Laura than he was rewarded by the overwhelming conviction
that she was more than worth it all. In some way peculiar to the
emotions her value increased in direct relation to the amount of
pleasure he told himself he had given up for her sake.

When at last he had freed himself from a few financial worries he had
lingered to attend to, and was hurrying toward her in the night express
which left New York, he assured himself that now for the first time he
was comfortably settled in a state which might be reasonably expected to
endure. The careless first impulse of his affection would wane, he
knew--it were as useless to regret the inevitable passing of the
spring--but beyond this was it not possible that Laura might hold his
interest by qualities more permanent than any transient exaltation of
the emotions? He thought of the soul in her face rather than of the mere
changing accident of form--of the smile which moved like an edge of
light across her eyes and lips--and this rare spiritual quality in her
appearance appealed to him at the instant as vividly as it had done on
the first day he saw her. This charm of strangeness had worn with him as
nothing in the domain of the sensations had worn in his life before. In
the smoking car, when he entered it a little later, he found a man