he suffered, let us rather say he
claimed to suffer the heated torments of a passionate nature, but he
perceived like fresh air and sunrise coming by blind updrawn and opened
window into a foetid chamber, that also he loved her with a clean and
bodiless love, was anxious to help her, was anxious now--it was a new
thing--to understand her, to reassure her, to give unrequited what once
he had sought rather to seem to give in view of an imagined exchange.

He perceived too in these still hours how little he had understood her
hitherto. He had been blinded,--obsessed. He had been seeing her and
himself and the whole world far too much as a display of the eternal
dualism of sex, the incessant pursuit. Now with his sexual imaginings
newly humbled and hopeless, with a realization of her own tremendous
minimization of that fundamental of romance, he began to see all that
there was in her personality and their possible relations outside that.
He saw how gravely and deeply serious was her fine philanthropy, how
honest and simple and impersonal her desire for knowledge and
understandings. There is the brain of her at least, he thought, far out
of Sir Isaac's reach. She wasn't abased by her surrenders, their
simplicity exalted her, showed her innocent and himself a flushed and
congested soul. He perceived now with the astonishment of a man newly
awakened just how the great obsession of sex had dominated him--for how
many years? Since his early undergraduate days. Had he anything to put
beside her own fine detachment? Had he ever since his manhood touched
philosophy, touched a social question, thought of anything human,
thought of art, or literature or belief, without a glancing reference of
the whole question to the uses of this eternal hunt? During that time
had he ever talked to a girl or woman with an unembarrassed sincerity?
He stripped his pretences bare; the answer was no. His very refinements
had been no more than indicative fig-leaves. His conservatism and
morality had been a mere dalliance with interests that too brutal a
simplicity might have exhausted prematurely. And indeed hadn't the whole
period of literature that had produced him been, in its straining purity
and refinement, as it were one glowing, one illuminated fig-leaf, a vast
conspiracy to keep certain matters always in mind by conspicuously
covering them away? But this wonderful woman--it seemed--she hadn't them
in mind! She shamed him if only by her trustful u