d it
had quenched his ambitions; and though his wish to wed Avice was not
entirely a wish to enrich her, the knowledge that she would be enriched
beyond anything that she could have anticipated was what allowed him to
indulge his love.

He was not exactly old he said to himself the next morning as he beheld
his face in the glass. And he looked considerably younger than he was.
But there was history in his face--distinct chapters of it; his brow was
not that blank page it once had been. He knew the origin of that line in
his forehead; it had been traced in the course of a month or two by past
troubles. He remembered the coming of this pale wiry hair; it had been
brought by the illness in Rome, when he had wished each night that he
might never wake again. This wrinkled corner, that drawn bit of skin,
they had resulted from those months of despondency when all seemed going
against his art, his strength, his happiness. 'You cannot live your life
and keep it, Jocelyn,' he said. Time was against him and love, and time
would probably win.

'When I went away from the first Avice,' he continued with whimsical
misery, 'I had a presentiment that I should ache for it some day. And
I am aching--have ached ever since this jade of an Ideal learnt the
unconscionable trick of inhabiting one image only.'

Upon the whole he was not without a bodement that it would be folly to
press on.

3. IV. A DASH FOR THE LAST INCARNATION

This desultory courtship of a young girl which had been brought about by
her mother's contrivance was interrupted by the appearance of Somers and
his wife and family on the Budmouth Esplanade. Alfred Somers, once the
youthful, picturesque as his own paintings, was now a middle-aged family
man with spectacles--spectacles worn, too, with the single object of
seeing through them--and a row of daughters tailing off to infancy, who
at present added appreciably to the income of the bathing-machine women
established along the sands.

Mrs. Somers--once the intellectual, emancipated Mrs. Pine-Avon--had now
retrograded to the petty and timid mental position of her mother and
grandmother, giving sharp, strict regard to the current literature and
art that reached the innocent presence of her long perspective of girls,
with the view of hiding every skull and skeleton of life from their
dear eyes. She was another illustration of the rule that succeeding
generations of women are seldom marked by cumulative progress, th