A Pair of Blue Eyes quotes

Elfride Swancourt was a girl whose emotions lay very near the surface.

Their nature more precisely, and as modified by the creeping hours of time, was known only to those who watched the circumstances of her history.

These eyes were blue; blue as autumn distance—blue as the blue we see between the retreating mouldings of hills and woody slopes on a sunny September morning.

A misty and shady blue, that had no beginning or surface, and was looked into rather than at.

As to her presence, it was not powerful; it was weak. Some women can make their personality pervade the atmosphere of a whole banqueting hall; Elfride’s was no more pervasive than that of a kitten.

As to her presence, it was not powerful; it was weak.

Some women can make their personality pervade the atmosphere of a whole banqueting hall; Elfride’s was no more pervasive than that of a kitten.

Elfride had as her own the thoughtfulness which appears in the face of the Madonna della Sedia, without its rapture: the warmth and spirit of the type of woman’s feature most common to the beauties—mortal and immortal—of Rubens, without their insistent fleshiness.

“Oh,” said Elfride indifferently, and returned towards her bleak station, and waited and shivered again. It was a trifle, after all—a childish thing—looking out from a tower and waving a handkerchief. But her new friend had promised, and why should he tease her so?

The effect of a blow is as proportionate to the texture of the object struck as to its own momentum; and she had such a superlative capacity for being wounded that little hits struck her hard.

It was not till the end of half an hour that two figures were seen above the parapet of the dreary old pile, motionless as bitterns on a ruined mosque.

She let go his arm and imperatively pushed it from her, tossing her head.

She had just learnt that a good deal of dignity is lost by asking a question to which an answer is refused, even ever so politely; for though politeness does good service in cases of requisition and compromise, it but little helps a direct refusal.

“I don’t wish to know anything of it; I don’t wish it,” she went on. “The carriage is waiting for us at the top of the hill; we must get in;” and Elfride flitted to the front. “Papa, here is your Elfride!”

A rapid red again filled her cheeks, and she looked at him meditatively.

What a proud moment it was for Elfride then! She was ruling a heart with absolute despotism for the first time in her life.

Stephen stealthily pounced upon her hand.

“Oh yes,” he replied judicially; “quite long enough.”

“It is not length of time, but the manner in which our minutes beat, that makes enough or not enough in our acquaintanceship.”

“Yes, I see that. But I wish papa suspected or knew what a very new thing I am doing. He does not think of it at all.”

That graceful though apparently accidental falling into position, which many have noticed as precipitating the end and making sweethearts the sweeter, was not here. Why? Because experience was absent.

A woman must have had many kisses before she kisses well.

In fact, the art of tendering the lips for these amatory salutes follows the principles laid down in treatises on legerdemain for performing the trick called Forcing a Card.

“Love is new, and fresh to us as the dew; and we are together. As the lover’s world goes, this is a great deal. Stephen, I fancy I see the difference between me and you—between men and women generally, perhaps.

I am content to build happiness on any accidental basis that may lie near at hand; you are for making a world to suit your happiness.

”

Oppressed, in spite of themselves, by a foresight of impending complications, Elfride and Stephen returned down the hill hand in hand. At the door they paused wistfully, like children late at school.

Women accept their destiny more readily than men.

Elfride had now resigned herself to the overwhelming idea of her lover’s sorry antecedents; Stephen had not forgotten the trifling grievance that Elfride had known earlier admiration than his own.

What they can do—what profits they can bring the firm—that’s all London men care about. And that is helped in him by his faculty of being uniformly pleasant.”

“Uniform pleasantness is rather a defect than a faculty. It shows that a man hasn’t sense enough to know whom to despise.”

“It shows that he acts by faith and not by sight, as those you claim succession from directed.”

“That’s some more of what he’s been telling you, I suppose! Yes, I was inclined to suspect him, because he didn’t care about sauces of any kind. I always did doubt a man’s being a gentleman if his palate had no acquired tastes.

An unedified palate is the irrepressible cloven foot of the upstart.

The idea of my bringing out a bottle of my ’40 Martinez—only eleven of them left now—to a man who didn’t know it from eighteenpenny! Then the Latin line he gave to my quotation; it was very cut-and-dried, very;

“No, no, no, papa,” she moaned.

For of all the miseries attaching to miserable love, the worst is the misery of thinking that the passion which is the cause of them all may cease.

“Elfride,” said her father with rough friendliness, “I have an excellent scheme on hand, which I cannot tell you of now. A scheme to benefit you and me.

To you, among bustle and excitement, it will be comparatively a short time, perhaps; oh, to me, it will be its real length trebled! Every summer will be a year—autumn a year—winter a year! O Stephen! and you may forget me!”

Forget: that was, and is, the real sting of waiting to fond-hearted woman.

The remark awoke in Stephen the converse fear. “You, too, may be persuaded to give me up, when time has made me fainter in your memory. For, remember, your love for me must be nourished in secret;

Elfride was almost unconsciously relieved, persuading herself that her father’s reserve on his business justified her in secrecy as regarded her own—a secrecy which was necessarily a foregone decision with her.

So anxious is a young conscience to discover a palliative, that the ex post facto nature of a reason is of no account in excluding it.

The intervening fortnight was spent by her mostly in walking by herself among the shrubs and trees, indulging sometimes in sanguine anticipations; more, far more frequently, in misgivings. All her flowers seemed dull of hue;

or even that would take all life away tomorrow, so long as it enabled me to get home again now. Brandy, that’s what I want.

That woman’s eyes have eaten my heart away!

”

At length she came trotting round to him, in appearance much as on the romantic morning of their visit to the cliff, but shorn of the radiance which glistened about her then. However, her comparative immunity from further risk and trouble had considerably composed her.

Elfride’s capacity for being wounded was only surpassed by her capacity for healing, which rightly or wrongly is by some considered an index of transientness of feeling in general.

“Elfride, what did they say at the Falcon?”

“You should write a novel.

The regular resource of people who don’t go enough into the world to live a novel is to write one.

”

and the eyes, though keen, permeated rather than penetrated: what they had lost of their boy-time brightness by a dozen years of hard reading lending a quietness to their gaze which suited them well.

A lady would have said there was a smell of tobacco in the room: a man that there was not.

Knight did not rise. He looked at a timepiece on the mantelshelf, then turned again to his letters, pointing to a chair.

Stephen sat down as if this kind of reception was by no means new, and away went Knight’s pen, beating up and down like a ship in a storm.

Cicero called the library the soul of the house; here the house was all soul.

Portions of the floor, and half the wall-space, were taken up by bookshelves ordinary and extraordinary;

But Elfride possessed special facilities for getting rid of trouble after a decent interval. Whilst a slow nature was imbibing a misfortune little by little, she had swallowed the whole agony of it at a draught and was brightening again.

She could slough off a sadness and replace it by a hope as easily as a lizard renews a diseased limb.

And two such excellent distractions had presented themselves. One was bringing out the romance and looking for notices in the papers, which, though they had been significantly short so far, had served to divert her thoughts.

“

As a diamond kills an opal in the same setting.

”

“We were talking of bracelets just now. Look at Lady Luxellian’s,” said Mrs. Swancourt, as that baroness lifted up her arm to support one of the children. “It is slipping up her arm—too large by half.

I hate to see daylight between a bracelet and a wrist; I wonder women haven’t better taste.

”

It was his attraction as a man. People liked him for those tones, and forgot that he had no talents.

Acquaintances remembered Mr. Swancourt by his manner; they remembered Stephen Smith by his face, Lord Luxellian by his laugh.

Mr. Swancourt made some friendly remarks—among others things upon the heat.

“Well, I suppose it is intended for satire; but don’t think anything more of it now, my dear. It is seven o’clock.” And Mrs. Swancourt rang for her maid.

Attack is more piquant than concord.

Stephen’s letter was concerning nothing but oneness with her: the review was the very reverse. And a stranger with neither name nor shape, age nor appearance, but a mighty voice, is naturally rather an interesting novelty to a lady he chooses to address.

But I think he is right in some of his arguments, though wrong in others. And because he has some claim to my respect I regret all the more that he should think so mistakenly of my motives in one or two instances.

It is more vexing to be misunderstood than to be misrepresented; and he misunderstands me.

I cannot be easy whilst a person goes to rest night after night attributing to me intentions I never had.”

“

So many people make a name nowadays, that it is more distinguished to remain in obscurity.

”

“As I have implied, I have not the wish. And if I had the wish, I could not now concentrate sufficiently.

We all have only our one cruse of energy given us to make the best of.

And where that energy has been leaked away week by week, quarter by quarter, as mine has for the last nine or ten years, there is not enough dammed back behind the mill at any given period to supply the force a complete book on …

“Oh, I am sorry to have parodied you,” she said with some confusion. “Yes, of course. That is what you meant about not trying to be famous.” And she added, with the quickness of conviction characteristic of her mind: “

There is much littleness in trying to be great.

A man must think a good deal of himself, and be conceited enough to believe in himself, before he tries at all.”

They awake to a recognition that they have, without premeditation, begun to try a little, and they say to themselves, ‘Since I have tried thus much, I will try a little more.’

They go on because they have begun.

”

“Checkmate,” said her opponent without the least emotion.

Oh, the difference between Elfride’s condition of mind now, and when she purposely made blunders that Stephen Smith might win!

It was bedtime. Her mind as distracted as if it would throb itself out of her head, she went off to her chamber, full of mortification at being beaten time after time when she herself was the aggressor.

“She is asleep now,” said Mrs. Swancourt. “She does not seem very well. Cousin Knight, what were you thinking of? her tender brain won’t bear cudgelling like your great head. You should have strictly forbidden her to play again.”

In truth, the essayist’s experience of the nature of young women was far less extensive than his abstract knowledge of them led himself and others to believe. He could pack them into sentences like a workman, but practically was nowhere.

“I am indeed sorry,” said Knight, feeling even more than he expressed. “But surely, the young lady knows best what is good for her!”

“Bless you, that’s just what she doesn’t know. She never thinks of such things, does she, Christopher? Her father and I have to command her and keep her in order, as you would a child.

She will say things worthy of a French epigrammatist, and act like a robin in a greenhouse.

But I think we will send for Dr. Granson—there can be no harm.”

“How old?

Why, seventeen, I should say. All girls are seventeen.

”

“Ah, what a poor nobody I am!” she said, sighing. “People like him, who go about the great world, don’t care in the least what I am like either in mood or feature.”

Perhaps a man who has got thoroughly into a woman’s mind in this manner, is halfway to her heart; the distance between those two stations is proverbially short.

“And are you really going away this week?” said Mrs. Swancourt to Knight on the following evening, which was Sunday.

“

Nobody’s life is altogether a failure.

”

“Well, you know what I mean, even though my words are badly selected and commonplace,” she said impatiently. “

Because I utter commonplace words, you must not suppose I think only commonplace thoughts.

My poor stock of words are like a limited number of rough moulds I have to cast all my materials in, good and bad; and the novelty or delicacy of the substance is often lost in the coarse triteness of the form.”

I suppose I must take you as I do the Bible—find out and understand all I can; and on the strength of that, swallow the rest in a lump, by simple faith. Think me vain, if you will.

Worldly greatness requires so much littleness to grow up in, that an infirmity more or less is not a matter for regret.

”

“As regards women, I can’t say,” answered Knight carelessly; “but it is without doubt a misfortune for a man who has a living to get, to be born of a truly noble nature.

A high soul will bring a man to the workhouse; so you may be right in sticking up for vanity.

”

“

Each bright star is overhead somewhere.

”

He had not been conscious that her entry into his sphere had added anything to himself; but now that she was taken away he was very conscious of a great deal being abstracted. The superfluity had become a necessity, and Knight was in love.

Stephen fell in love with Elfride by looking at her: Knight by ceasing to do so.

When or how the spirit entered into him he knew not:

With added years, more of the faculties attempt a partnership in the passion, till at Knight’s age the understanding is fain to have a hand in it. It may as well be left out.

A man in love setting up his brains as a gauge of his position is as one determining a ship’s longitude from a light at the masthead.

Knight argued from Elfride’s unwontedness of manner, which was matter of fact, to an unwontedness in love, which was matter of inference only. Incrédules les plus crédules. “Elfride,” he said, “had hardly looked upon a man till she saw me.”

Knight’s intention of an early return to Endelstow having originally been faint, his promise to do so had been fainter.

He was a man who kept his words well to the rear of his possible actions.

The vicar was rather surprised to see him again so soon: Mrs. Swancourt was not. Knight found, on meeting them all, after his arrival had been announced, that they had formed an intention to go to St.

The composition of the huge hill was revealed to its backbone and marrow here at its rent extremity. It consisted of a vast stratification of blackish-gray slate, unvaried in its whole height by a single change of shade.

It is with cliffs and mountains as with persons; they have what is called a presence, which is not necessarily proportionate to their actual bulk.

A little cliff will impress you powerfully; a great one not at all. It depends, as with man, upon the countenance of the cliff.

It is with cliffs and mountains as with persons; they have what is called a presence, which is not necessarily proportionate to their actual bulk.

A little cliff will impress you powerfully; a great one not at all.

It depends, as with man, upon the countenance of the cliff.

A minute—perhaps more time—was passed in mute thought by both. On a sudden the blank and helpless agony left her face. She vanished over the bank from his sight.

Knight felt himself in the presence of a personalized loneliness.

There is no place like a cleft landscape for bringing home such imaginings as these.

Time closed up like a fan before him.

He saw himself at one extremity of the years, face to face with the beginning and all the intermediate centuries simultaneously.

She is read as a person with a curious temper; as one who does not scatter kindnesses and cruelties alternately, impartially, and in order, but heartless severities or overwhelming generosities in lawless caprice.

Man’s case is always that of the prodigal’s favourite or the miser’s pensioner.

In her unfriendly moments there seems a feline fun in her tricks, begotten by a foretaste of her pleasure in swallowing the victim.

This is what he saw down there: the surface of the sea—visually just past his toes, and under his feet; actually one-eighth of a mile, or more than two hundred yards, below them.

We colour according to our moods the objects we survey.

The sea would have been a deep neutral blue, had happier auspices attended the gazer: it was now no otherwise than distinctly black to his vision. That narrow white border was foam, he knew well;

The world was to some extent turned upside down for him. Rain descended from below. Beneath his feet was aerial space and the unknown; above him was the firm, familiar ground, and upon it all that he loved best.

Pitiless nature had then two voices, and two only.

The nearer was the voice of the wind in his ears rising and falling as it mauled and thrust him hard or softly.

Knight perseveringly held fast. Had he any faith in Elfride? Perhaps.

Love is faith, and faith, like a gathered flower, will rootlessly live on.

Nobody would have expected the sun to shine on such an evening as this. Yet it appeared, low down upon the sea.

To remain passive, as she remained now, encircled by his arms, was a sufficiently complete result—a glorious crown to all the years of her life. Perhaps he was only grateful, and did not love her.

No matter: it was infinitely more to be even the slave of the greater than the queen of the less.

Some such sensation as this, though it was not recognized as a finished thought, raced along the impressionable soul of Elfride.

Stephen was conscious of a gnawing pain at his heart. He retreated as he had come.

There are disappointments which wring us, and there are those which inflict a wound whose mark we bear to our graves.

Such are so keen that no future gratification of the same desire can ever obliterate them: they become registered as a permanent loss of happiness. Such a one was Stephen’s now: the crowning aureola of the dream had been the meeting here by stealth;

He started for Birmingham the next morning. A day’s delay would have made no difference; but he could not rest until he had begun and ended the programme proposed to himself.

Bodily activity will sometimes take the sting out of anxiety as completely as assurance itself.

That entered into and mingled with the sensations his new experience had begotten. The tale told by the little scene he had witnessed ran parallel with the unhappy woman’s opinion, which, however baseless it might have been antecedently, had become true enough as regarded himself.

A slow weight of despair, as distinct from a violent paroxysm as starvation from a mortal shot, filled him and wrung him body and soul.

The discovery had not been altogether unexpected, for throughout his anxiety of the last few days since the night in the churchyard, he had been inclined to construe the uncertainty unfavourably for himself.

The nearest way to the cottage was by crossing the park. He did not hurry.

Happiness frequently has reason for haste, but it is seldom that desolation need scramble or strain.

Sometimes he paused under the low-hanging arms of the trees, looking vacantly on the ground.

“

Not more than seven or eight and twenty by candlelight. But, Lord! by day ’a was forty if ’a were an hour.

”

“Too much,” observed Martin. “In short, ’tis out of the question that a human being can be so mournful as black edges half-an-inch wide.

I’m sure people don’t feel more than a very narrow border when they feels most of all.

”

“Because ’tis churchyard law, you simple. The law of the living is, that a man shall be upright and downright, and the law of the dead is, that a man shall be east and west.

Every state of society have its laws.

”

Then her grandmother died, and the title and everything went away to another branch of the family altogether. Parson Swancourt wasted a good deal of his wife’s money, and she left him Miss Elfride.

That trick of running away seems to be handed down in families, like craziness or gout.

And they two women be alike as peas.”

Love frequently dies of time alone

—much more frequently of displacement. With Elfride Swancourt, a powerful reason why the displacement should be successful was that the newcomer was a greater man than the first.

… was his too timid habit of dispraising himself beside her—a peculiarity which, exercised towards sensible men, stirs a kindly chord of attachment that a marked assertiveness would leave untouched, but inevitably leads the most sensible woman in the world to undervalue him who practises it.

Directly domineering ceases in the man, snubbing begins in the woman

; the trite but no less unfortunate fact being that the gentler creature rarely has the capacity to appreciate fair treatment from her natural complement. The abiding perception of the position of Stephen’s parents had, of course, a little to do with Elfride’s renunciation.

The perception of his littleness beside Knight grew upon her alarmingly. She now thought how sound had been her father’s advice to her to give him up, and was as passionately desirous of following it as she had hitherto been averse.

Perhaps there is nothing more hardening to the tone of young minds than thus to discover how their dearest and strongest wishes become gradually attuned by Time the Cynic to the very note of some selfish policy which in earlier days they despised.

The hour of appointment came, and with it a crisis; and with the crisis a collapse.

Perhaps there is nothing more hardening to the tone of young minds than thus to discover how their dearest and strongest wishes become gradually attuned by Time the Cynic to the very note of some selfish policy which in earlier days they despised.

The hour of appointment came, and with it a crisis; and with the crisis a collapse.

“God forgive me—I can’t meet Stephen!” she exclaimed to herself. “I don’t love him less, but I love Mr. Knight more!”

Yes: she would save herself from a man not fit for her—in spite of vows. She would obey her father, and have no more to do with Stephen Smith.

Thus the fickle resolve showed signs of assuming the complexion of a virtue.

The following days were passed without any definite avowal from Knight’s lips.

But the time for a change had come. She never alluded to even a knowledge of Knight’s friend.

When women are secret they are secret indeed; and more often than not they only begin to be secret with the advent of a second lover.

The elopement was now a spectre worse than the first, and, like the Spirit in Glenfinlas, it waxed taller with every attempt to lay it. Her natural honesty invited her to confide in Knight, and trust to his generosity for forgiveness:

He was the youth who had called her his inseparable wife many a time, and whom she had even addressed as her husband. Their eyes met.

Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length.

Their glance, but a moment chronologically, was a season in their history. To Elfride the intense agony of reproach in Stephen’s eye was a nail piercing her heart with a deadliness no words can describe.

Elfride’s troubles sat upon her face as well as in her heart.

Perhaps to a woman it is almost as dreadful to think of losing her beauty as of losing her reputation.

At any rate, she looked quite as gloomy as she had looked at any minute that day.

She was powerless to disobey, and turned forthwith; and then, without any defined intention in either’s mind, his face and hers drew closer together; and he supported her there, and kissed her.

Knight was at once the most ardent and the coolest man alive.

When his emotions slumbered he appeared almost phlegmatic; when they were moved he was no less than passionate. And now, without having quite intended an early marriage, he put the question plainly.

“I don’t press you for an answer now, darling,” he said, seeing she was not likely to give a lucid reply. “Take your time.”

Knight was as honourable a man as was ever loved and deluded by woman.

It may be said that his blindness in love proved the point, for shrewdness in love usually goes with meanness in general. Once the passion had mastered him, the intellect had gone for naught.

“

Bravery is only obtuseness to the perception of contingencies

,” Mr. Swancourt severely answered.

“Entrance passages are very draughty places, and the Channel is like the rest. It ruins the temper of sailors.

It has been calculated by philosophers that more damns go up to heaven from the Channel, in the course of a year, than from all the five oceans put together.

”

Elfride clung closer to Knight as day succeeded day. Whatever else might admit of question, there could be no dispute that the allegiance she bore him absorbed her whole soul and existence.

A greater than Stephen had arisen, and she had left all to follow him.

The unreserved girl was never chary of letting her lover discover how much she admired him.

He stood for a moment admiring the fresh appearance of the leaves by candlelight, and then he thought of the transaction of the day.

Male lovers as well as female can be spoilt by too much kindness

, and Elfride’s uniform submissiveness had given Knight a rather exacting manner at crises, attached to her as he was. “Why should she have refused the one I first chose?” he now asked himself.

“Yes; I suppose it is right.

Shallowness has this advantage, that you can’t be drowned there.

”

But I do often regret having ever written it, as well as others of the sort. I have grown older since, and I find such a tone of writing is calculated to do harm in the world.

Every literary Jack becomes a gentleman if he can only pen a few indifferent satires upon womankind

: women themselves, too, have taken to the trick; and so, upon the whole, I begin to be rather ashamed of my companions.”

“Why?

Because they would never then be distracted by discovering their idol was secondhand.

”

that the lengthened course of inaction he had lately been indulging in on Elfride’s account might probably not be good for him as a man who had work to do. It could quickly be put an end to by hastening on his marriage with her.

Knight, in his own opinion, was one who had missed his mark by excessive aiming.

Having now, to a great extent, given up ideal ambitions, he wished earnestly to direct his powers into a more practical channel, and thus correct the introspective tendencies which had never brought himself much happiness, or done his fellow-creatures any great good.

“I would gladly have told you; for I knew and know I had done wrong. But I dared not; I loved you too well. Oh, so well! You have been everything in the world to me—and you are now. Will you not forgive me?”

It is a melancholy thought, that men who at first will not allow the verdict of perfection they pronounce upon their sweethearts or wives to be disturbed by God’s own testimony to the contrary, will, once suspecting their purity, morally hang them upon evidence they would be ashamed to admit in judging a dog.

The reluctance to tell, which arose from Elfride’s simplicity in thinking herself so much more culpable than she really was, had been doing fatal work in Knight’s mind.

that the unreserve, which was really artlessness without ballast, meant indifference to decorum; and what so likely as that such a woman had been deceived in the past? He said to himself, in a mood of the bitterest cynicism: “

The suspicious discreet woman who imagines dark and evil things of all her fellow-creatures is far too shrewd to be deluded by man: trusting beings like Elfride are the women who fall.

”

The moral rightness of this man’s life was worthy of all praise; but in spite of some intellectual acumen,

Knight had in him a modicum of that wrongheadedness which is mostly found in scrupulously honest people.

With him, truth seemed too clean and pure an abstraction to be so hopelessly churned in with error as practical persons find it.

The spirit of self-denial, verging on asceticism, which had ever animated Knight in old times, announced itself as having departed with the birth of love, with it having gone the self-respect which had compensated for the lack of self-gratification.

Poor little Elfride, instead of holding, as formerly, a place in his religion, began to assume the hue of a temptation.

Perhaps it was human and correctly natural that Knight never once thought whether he did not owe her a little sacrifice for her unchary devotion in saving his life.

“Repentance! was there ever such a fool as you, John?

Did anybody ever repent with money in’s pocket and fifty years to live?

”

“Thanks, but they are nothing very extraordinary. A natural professional progress where there was no opposition.”

There followed that want of words which will always assert itself between nominal friends who find they have ceased to be real ones, and have not yet sunk to the level of mere acquaintance.

Each looked up and down the Park. Knight may possibly have borne in mind during the intervening months Stephen’s manner towards him the last time they had met, and may have encouraged his former interest in Stephen’s welfare to die out of him as misplaced.

… folded them away again, placed them in his pocket, and instead of going on with an examination into the state of the artistic world, had remained musing on the strange circumstance that he had returned to find Knight not the husband of Elfride after all.

The possibility of any given gratification begets a cumulative sense of its necessity.

Stephen gave the rein to his imagination, and felt more intensely than he had felt for many months that, without Elfride, his life would never be any great pleasure to himself, or honour to his Maker.

The truth is, Stephen’s introduction of Elfride’s lineaments had been so unconscious that he had not at first understood his companion’s drift.

The hand, like the tongue, easily acquires the trick of repetition by rote, without calling in the mind to assist at all; and this had been the case here.

Young men who cannot write verses about their Loves generally take to portraying them, and in the early days of his attachment Smith had never been weary of outlining Elfride. The lay-figure of Stephen’s sketches now initiated an adjustment of many things.

“How shall I answer without being ashamed? What fickle beings we men are, Stephen!

Men may love strongest for a while, but women love longest.

I used to love her—in my way, you know.”

It smote his heart like a switch when he remembered how gently she had borne his scourging speeches, never answering him with a single reproach, only assuring him of her unbounded love.

Knight blessed Elfride for her sweetness, and forgot her fault.

He pictured with a vivid fancy those fair summer scenes with her. He again saw her as at their first meeting, timid at speaking, yet in her eagerness to be explanatory borne forward almost against her will.