.

Peter had plenty of time for considering where he found himself that
afternoon, for the ladies were bent on a shopping expedition on which
they had rather pointedly given him to understand he was not expected to
attend. He had tried that once, and had hit upon the excellent device,
in face of the outrageous prices proposed by the dealers, of having them
settle upon what they would like and sending Luigi back to bargain for
it. All of which would have gone very well if Mrs. Merrithew, in the
delight of his amazing success, had not gone back to the shop the next
day to duplicate his purchases. Peter had never heard what occurred on
that occasion, but he had noticed that they never talked in his
presence of buying anything again. Bloombury people, he should have
remembered, had perfectly definite notions about having things done for
them.

He walked, therefore, on this afternoon in the Public Gardens and tried
to reconstruct in their original force the reasons for his not marrying
Savilla Dassonville. They had come upon him overwhelmingly in the
recrudescence of memory, reasons rooted very simply in his man's hunger
for the lift, the dizzying eminence of desire. He liked the girl well
enough but he did not want her as he had wanted Eunice Goodward, as he
wanted expansively at this moment to want something, somebody--who was
not Eunice--he was perfectly clear on this point--but should be in a
measure all she stood for to him. He had renewed in the night, though in
so short a time, not less acutely, all the wounded misery of what Eunice
had forced upon him. He was there between the dark and dawn, and here
again in the cool of the garden, to taste the full bitterness of the
conviction that he was not good enough to be loved. He was not to be
helped from that by the thought, which came hurrying on the heels of
the other, that Savilla Dassonville loved him. He had a moment of almost
hating her as she seemed to plead with him, by no motion of her own he
was obliged to confess for those raptures, leaping fires, winged rushes,
which should have been his portion of their situation.

He hated her for the certainty that if he went away now quietly without
saying anything, it would be to visit on her undeservedly all that had
come to him from Eunice. For she would know; she would not, as he had
been, be blind to the point of requiring the spoken word. If he left her
now it would be to the unavoidable knowledge that, as the Prince