into the applicant's calculations, it wouldn't be a thing to
break his heart about exactly. He would have made rather an ass of
himself, certainly. But he was quite prepared not to be any the worse.

This was, however, not subcutaneous, with him. He said it to himself,
quite openly. His concealment of himself from himself turned on a sort
of passive resistance he was offering to a growing reluctance to hear a
negative to his application. He was, despite himself, entertaining the
question:--Was this woman whom he had been assessing and wavering over,
_more masculino_, conceivably likely to reject him on his merits? Might
she not say to him:--"I have seen your drift, and found you too pleasant
an acquaintance to condemn offhand. But now that you force me to ask
myself the question, 'Can I love you?' you leave me no choice but to
answer, 'I can't.'" And he was beginning to have a misgiving that he
would very much rather that that scratch, if ever he came to it, should
end on very different lines from this. All this, mind you, was under the
skin of his reflections.

As he walked away slowly in the moonlight, with the appointment fresh in
his mind to return next day on a shallow archaeological pretext, he may
have been himself at a loss for his reason for completing a tour of the
square, and pausing to look up at the house before making a definite
start for his Club, or his rooms in Brook Street. Was any reason
necessary, beyond the fineness of the night? He had an indisputable
right to walk round Cavendish Square without a reason, and he exercised
it. He rather resented the policeman on his beat saying goodnight to
him, as though he were abnormal, and walked away in the opposite
direction from that officer, who was searchlighting areas for want of
something to do, with an implication of profound purpose. He decided on
loneliness and a walk exactly the length of a cigar, throwing its last
effort to burn his fingers away on his doorstep. He carried the
animation of his thoughts on his face upstairs to bed with him, for it
lasted through a meditation at an open window, through a chorus of cats
about their private affairs, and the usual controversy about the hour
among all the town-clocks, which becomes embittered when there is only
one hour to talk about, and compromise is impossible. Mr. Pellew heard
the last opinion and retired for the night at nine minutes past. But he
first made sure that that _Quarterly Review_ was in ev