o be--would override all others, it was now quite clear that
Ashley's claim on her stood first of all. He had been so loyal, so true,
so indifferent to his own interests! Besides, he loved her. It was now
quite another love from that of the romantic knight who had wooed a
gracious lady in the little house at Southsea. That tapestry-tale had
ended on the day of his arrival at Tory Hill. In its place there had
risen the tested devotion of a man for a woman in great trouble,
compelled to deal with the most sordid things in life. He had refused to
be spared any of the details she would have saved him from or to turn
away from any of the problems she was obliged to face. His very revolt
against it, that repugnance to the necessity for doing it which he was
not at all times able to conceal, made his self-command in bringing
himself to it the more worthy of her esteem. He had the defects of his
qualities and the prejudices of his class and profession; but over and
above these pardonable failings he had the marks of a hero.

And now there was this thing!

She had descried it from afar. She had had a suspicion of it before
Davenant went away. It had not created a fear; it was too strange and
improbable for that; but it had brought with it a sense of wonder. She
remembered the first time she had felt it, this sense of wonder, this
sense of something enchanted, outside life and the earth's atmosphere.
It was at that moment on the lawn when, after the unsuccessful meeting
between Ashley and Davenant, she had turned with the latter to go into
the house. That there was a protective, intimate element in her feeling
she had known on the instant; but what she hadn't known on the instant,
but was perfectly aware of now, was that her whole subconscious being,
had been crying out even then: "My own! My own!"

With the exaggeration of this thought she was able to get herself in
hand. She was able to debate so absurd a suggestion, to argue it down,
and turn it into ridicule. But she yielded again as the Voice that
talked with her urged the plea: "I didn't say you knew it consciously.
You couldn't cry 'My own! My own!' to a man whom up to that point you
had treated with disdain. But your subliminal being had begun to know
him, to recognize him as--"

To elude this fancy she set herself to recapitulating his weak points.
She could see why Ashley should thrust him aside as being "not a
gentleman." He fell short, in two or three points, of th