d to warm Ann Veronica to a
familiar affection with Ramage, was certainly warming Ramage to a
constantly deepening interest in Ann Veronica. He felt that he was
getting on with her very slowly indeed, but he did not see how he could
get on faster. He had, he felt, to create certain ideas and vivify
certain curiosities and feelings in her. Until that was done a certain
experience of life assured him that a girl is a locked coldness against
a man's approach. She had all the fascination of being absolutely
perplexing in this respect. On the one hand, she seemed to think plainly
and simply, and would talk serenely and freely about topics that most
women have been trained either to avoid or conceal; and on the other she
was unconscious, or else she had an air of being unconscious--that was
the riddle--to all sorts of personal applications that almost any girl
or woman, one might have thought, would have made. He was always doing
his best to call her attention to the fact that he was a man of spirit
and quality and experience, and she a young and beautiful woman, and
that all sorts of constructions upon their relationship were possible,
trusting her to go on from that to the idea that all sorts of
relationships were possible. She responded with an unfaltering
appearance of insensibility, and never as a young and beautiful woman
conscious of sex; always in the character of an intelligent girl
student.

His perception of her personal beauty deepened and quickened with each
encounter. Every now and then her general presence became radiantly
dazzling in his eyes; she would appear in the street coming toward him,
a surprise, so fine and smiling and welcoming was she, so expanded and
illuminated and living, in contrast with his mere expectation. Or he
would find something--a wave in her hair, a little line in the contour
of her brow or neck, that made an exquisite discovery.

He was beginning to think about her inordinately. He would sit in
his inner office and compose conversations with her, penetrating,
illuminating, and nearly conclusive--conversations that never proved to
be of the slightest use at all with her when he met her face to face.
And he began also at times to wake at night and think about her.

He thought of her and himself, and no longer in that vein of incidental
adventure in which he had begun. He thought, too, of the fretful invalid
who lay in the next room to his, whose money had created his business
and made