inting, and with it all there was her mother's
untiring insistence upon the urgency of getting married. It was more
than disappointing: it was a genuine grievance, but a grievance of a
kind which most young women nowadays bury unredressed, and the former
existence of which in their lives they reveal only by a tired, wasted
look in their faces, which leads their husbands to consider
them--"delicate."

With all her fastidiousness in regard to the man of her desire, however,
Cleopatra was not to be confused with the romantic idealist who craves
for that which never has been and never can be possible on earth. To
have misunderstood her to this extent would have been a gross injustice.
She had built up her picture of her mate, not with the help of feverish
and morbid fancy, but guided only by the hints of an exceptionally
healthy body. Modest to a degree to which only great reserves of
passion can attain, it was to her a dire need that her mate should have
fire, because half-consciously she divined that only fire purified and
sanctified the transition from girlhood to womanhood. Half-heartedness
here, or the lack of a great passionate momentum, that carried
everything before it, spelt to her something distinctly discomfiting,
not to say indecent. And in this, far from being a romantic idealist,
she was entirely right and realistic. This explains why her taste
inclined more resolutely to the adventurous idea of love, to the
impromptu element, to the wild ardour of first embraces that must
perforce flee from the sight of fellow creatures, than to the kind of
graduated passion which begins with conversation, proceeds to a public
engagement with staring people all about you, and ends with the still
more measured tempo of a Church wedding. All the waiting, all the
temporising, all the toadlike deliberation that these various slow steps
involved, ran counter to her deepest feeling, that her love must be a
matter of touch and go, a sudden kindling of two fires, the burning not
of green wood but of a volcano.

But where, these days, could she find the partner who was prepared, and
above all equipped, to play his part to hers? This was her grievance.
And again in justice to her it must be acknowledged that it was a
genuine one.

The young man whom her mother was at present "running" for her, was a
creature at whom, as a girl of eighteen, she would not have looked a
second time. But how much more modest in its demands had her taste