to avail
himself of Nature's offer. His constitution was made up of very simple
particulars; was one which, rare in the spring-time of civilizations,
seems to grow abundant as a nation gets older, individuality fades,
and education spreads; that is, his brain had extraordinary receptive
powers, and no great creativeness. Quickly acquiring any kind of
knowledge he saw around him, and having a plastic adaptability more
common in woman than in man, he changed colour like a chameleon as the
society he found himself in assumed a higher and more artificial tone.
He had not many original ideas, and yet there was scarcely an idea to
which, under proper training, he could not have added a respectable
co-ordinate.

He saw nothing outside himself to-night; and what he saw within was a
weariness to his flesh. Yet to a dispassionate observer, his pretensions
to Elfride, though rather premature, were far from absurd as marriages
go, unless the accidental proximity of simple but honest parents could
be said to make them so.

The clock struck eleven when he entered the house. Elfride had been
waiting with scarcely a movement since he departed. Before he had spoken
to her she caught sight of him passing into the study with her father.
She saw that he had by some means obtained the private interview he
desired.

A nervous headache had been growing on the excitable girl during the
absence of Stephen, and now she could do nothing beyond going up again
to her room as she had done before. Instead of lying down she sat again
in the darkness without closing the door, and listened with a beating
heart to every sound from downstairs. The servants had gone to bed.
She ultimately heard the two men come from the study and cross to the
dining-room, where supper had been lingering for more than an hour. The
door was left open, and she found that the meal, such as it was,
passed off between her father and her lover without any remark, save
commonplaces as to cucumbers and melons, their wholesomeness and
culture, uttered in a stiff and formal way. It seemed to prefigure
failure.

Shortly afterwards Stephen came upstairs to his bedroom, and was almost
immediately followed by her father, who also retired for the night. Not
inclined to get a light, she partly undressed and sat on the bed, where
she remained in pained thought for some time, possibly an hour. Then
rising to close her door previously to fully unrobing, she saw a streak
of light shining