ten concluded on the fact of his weakness, as he called it, for
life--his strength merely for thought--life, he logically opined, was
what he must somehow arrange to annex and possess. This was so much a
necessity that thought by itself only went on in the void; it was from
the immediate air of life that it must draw its breath. So the young
man, ingenious but large, critical but ardent too, made out both his
case and Kate Croy's. They had originally met before her mother's
death--an occasion marked for her as the last pleasure permitted by the
approach of that event; after which the dark months had interposed a
screen and, for all Kate knew, made the end one with the beginning.

The beginning--to which she often went back--had been a scene, for our
young woman, of supreme brilliancy; a party given at a "gallery" hired
by a hostess who fished with big nets. A Spanish dancer, understood to
be at that moment the delight of the town, an American reciter, the joy
of a kindred people, an Hungarian fiddler, the wonder of the world at
large--in the name of these and other attractions the company in which,
by a rare privilege, Kate found herself had been freely convoked. She
lived under her mother's roof, as she considered, obscurely, and was
acquainted with few persons who entertained on that scale; but she had
had dealings with two or three connected, as appeared, with such--two
or three through whom the stream of hospitality, filtered or diffused,
could thus now and then spread to outlying receptacles. A good-natured
lady in fine, a friend of her mother and a relative of the lady of the
gallery, had offered to take her to the party in question and had there
fortified her, further, with two or three of those introductions that,
at large parties, lead to other things--that had at any rate, on this
occasion, culminated for her in conversation with a tall, fair,
slightly unbrushed and rather awkward, but on the whole not dreary,
young man. The young man had affected her as detached, as--it was
indeed what he called himself--awfully at sea, as much more distinct
from what surrounded them than any one else appeared to be, and even as
probably quite disposed to be making his escape when pulled up to be
placed in relation with her. He gave her his word for it indeed, that
same evening, that only their meeting had prevented his flight, but
that now he saw how sorry he should have been to miss it. This point
they had reached by midnigh