usion.

Through the open door he saw young Hollingsworth rise with a yawn
from the ineffectual solace of a brandy-and-soda and transport his
purposeless person to the window. Glennard measured his course with a
contemptuous eye. It was so like Hollingsworth to get up and look out of
the window just as it was growing too dark to see anything! There was
a man rich enough to do what he pleased--had he been capable of
being pleased--yet barred from all conceivable achievement by his own
impervious dulness; while, a few feet off, Glennard, who wanted only
enough to keep a decent coat on his back and a roof over the head of the
woman he loved, Glennard, who had sweated, toiled, denied himself for
the scant measure of opportunity that his zeal would have converted into
a kingdom--sat wretchedly calculating that, even when he had resigned
from the club, and knocked off his cigars, and given up his Sundays out
of town, he would still be no nearer attainment.

The Spectator had slipped to his feet and as he picked it up his eye
fell again on the paragraph addressed to the friends of Mrs. Aubyn. He
had read it for the first time with a scarcely perceptible quickening of
attention: her name had so long been public property that his eye passed
it unseeingly, as the crowd in the street hurries without a glance by
some familiar monument.

"Information concerning the period previous to her coming to
England...." The words were an evocation. He saw her again as she had
looked at their first meeting, the poor woman of genius with her long
pale face and short-sighted eyes, softened a little by the grace of
youth and inexperience, but so incapable even then of any hold upon
the pulses. When she spoke, indeed, she was wonderful, more wonderful,
perhaps, than when later, to Glennard's fancy at least, the conscious
of memorable things uttered seemed to take from even her most intimate
speech the perfect bloom of privacy. It was in those earliest days, if
ever, that he had come near loving her; though even then his sentiment
had lived only in the intervals of its expression. Later, when to
be loved by her had been a state to touch any man's imagination, the
physical reluctance had, inexplicably, so overborne the intellectual
attraction, that the last years had been, to both of them, an agony of
conflicting impulses. Even now, if, in turning over old papers, his hand
lit on her letters, the touch filled him with inarticulate misery....

"Sh