takes
her into his life, and gives her back self-respect, and a place among
women, and, above all, the feeling that of all feelings a woman holds
dearest, "Somebody wants me." It must be good to be loved as such a
woman would love. His generosity, which instinctively went out to
abandoned things, walked hand in hand with man's eternal, indestructible
selfishness that night, as he thought of Mrs. Chepstow for the first
time as married again to some man who cared not for the world's opinion,
or who cared for it so much as to revel in defying it.

How would she love such a man?

He began to wonder about that part of her nature dedicated to, designed
for, love.

With him she was always perfectly simple, and seemed extremely frank.
But he felt now that in her simplicity she had always been reserved,
almost strangely reserved for such a woman. Perhaps that reserve had
been her answer to his plainly shown respect. Just because of her
position, he had been even more respectful to her than he was to other
women, following in this a dictate of his temperament. What would she be
like in the unreserve of a great love?

And now a fire was kindled in Nigel, and began to burn up fiercely. He
felt, very consciously and definitely, the fascination of this woman. Of
course, he had always been more or less subject to it. Isaacson had
known that when he saw Nigel draw his chair nearer to hers at the
supper-table in the Savoy. But he had been subject to it without ever
saying to himself, "I am in subjection." He had never supposed that he
was in subjection. The abrupt consciousness of how it was with him
excited him tremendously. After the long interval of years, was he to
feel again the powerful fever, and for a woman how different from the
woman he had loved? She stood, in her young purity, at one end of the
chain of years, and Mrs. Chepstow--did she really stand at the other?

He seemed to see these two looking at each other across the space that
was set by Time, and for a moment his face contracted. But he had
changed while traversing that space. Then he was an eager boy, in the
joy of his bounding youth. Now he was a vigorous man. And during the
interval that separated boy from man had come up in him his strong love
of humanity, his passion for the development of the good that lies
everywhere, like the ore in gold-bearing earth. That love had perhaps
been given to him to combine the two loves, the altruistic love, and the
love fo