ss they gave him food for much vigilant thought,
which came back always to the great interest of his life. Futility!
Did she too, the beloved woman, point an accusing finger, casting
back at him a sacrifice which, certainly, in his then disability
seemed to him vain enough? For all his goodwill, had he gained any
more for her than a short respite, the temporal reconstruction of a
fading illusion?--and at what a price! The irony of things was just
then so present to him that he could readily believe he had done no
more than that--enough merely to embitter her knowledge when it
should finally come. And an old saying of Lady Garnett's returned to
him, which, at the time, he had disputed; but which struck him now
with the sharp stab of an intimate truth. "You could have prevented
it, had you wished." Yes, he might have prevented it, if only he had
foreseen; the wise old woman had not made a mistake. And yet he had
wished to prevent it, in a manner, only his colder second
thoughts--he made no allowance now for their generous intention--had
found propriety in the match, and his long habit of spectatorship
had made the personal effort, which interference would have
involved, impossible.

Harking back scrupulously to the remote days of Eve's girlhood, his
morbid recollection collected a variety of scattered threads, of
dispersed signs and tokens, which led him to ask at last, with a
gathering dread, whether he had not made a mistake, must not plead
guilty to a charge of malingering, or, at least, of intellectual
cowardice in acquiescing so supinely in defeat?

Was it true, then, that a man found in life very much what he
brought to the search?

Certainly, the world was full of persons who had been broken on the
wheel for their proper audacity, because they had sought so much
more than was to be found; but might it not be equally true that one
could err on the other side, expect, desire too little, less even
than was there, and so reap finally, as he had done, in an immense
lassitude and disgust of all things, born neither of satiety nor of
disappointment, the full measure of one's reward? Perhaps success in
the difficult art of life depended, almost as much as in the plastic
arts, upon conviction, upon the personal enthusiasm which one
brought to bear upon its conduct, and was never really compatible
with that attitude of half-disdainful toleration which he had so
early acquired.

Yet that was a confession of failure he w