then she was friend, then for some reason
she was some sort of shadow of these excellent things. They were there,
but they were obscured by something else. And that obscuration rendered
her the more enchanting. He did not understand her; she was away
somewhere beyond him, and he longed to follow her.

All his life women had been to him the most delectable of riddles,
and his expressed desire to marry and settle down was perhaps only
another statement of the fact that he longed to solve one example of
the riddle, one form in which it was presented to him. He felt now
that he wished he had married years ago, that he had already become
quiet and domesticated. There was a time for youth's fiery passions,
its ecstatic uncontent, and there was also most assuredly a time when
those fevers should cease.

He had so repeatedly told himself that it was time they should cease
for him, that of late he had come to believe it. He believed it still,
and it was for that reason that he had determined to settle down, to
choose, as he had done in his own mind, this pretty and charming girl,
much younger than himself, as was right, and ask her to settle down with
him.

He was not in love with her in any absorbed or tumultuous way, but he
meant to do his best to make her happy, and looked forward to being
immensely happy himself. All that had seemed very right and reasonable
and satisfactory, but to-night, in some way, the mirror of his future
tranquillity was disturbed; it was as if little sudden puffs of wind,
like those that rustled every now and then through "the darkness thick
and hot" outside, ruffled and broke its surface, making it dim and full
of shattered images that seemed to have swum up from below.

Was it that once again he was beginning to fall in love with Daisy in
the old passionate way? But at that moment he was aware that he was not
thinking about Daisy at all.

All this passed very rapidly through his mind; it was no effort of
conscious or reasoned thought, but more as if without volition of his
own these pictures had been drawn across his brain, as he stood in the
hall while the rustling procession of women went upstairs. And with
their going, he became aware that the rest of the evening was likely to
be rather boring.

It was still not after half-past ten, an hour impossible to go to bed
at, impossible, anyhow, to go to sleep at, and he fancied that his own
company and his own thoughts were not likely to be very