become friends without
seeing each other, and he had concocted his scheme without being
aware of the feelings which she had excited. The scheme had been
carried out; he had had his dinner-party; Marion Fay had poked his
fire; there had been one little pressure of the hand as he helped her
into the carriage, one little whispered word, which had it not been
whispered would have been as nothing; one moment of consciousness
that his lips were close to her cheek; and then he returned to the
warmth of his fire, quite conscious that he was in love.

What was to come of it? When he had argued both with his sister and
with Roden that their marriage would be unsuitable because of their
difference in social position, and had justified his opinion by
declaring it to be impossible that any two persons could, by their
own doing, break through the conventions of the world without
ultimate damage to themselves and to others, he had silently
acknowledged to himself that he also was bound by the law which he
was teaching. That such conventions should gradually cease to be,
would be good; but no man is strong enough to make a new law for his
own governing at the spur of the moment;--and certainly no woman.
The existing distances between man and man were radically bad. This
was the very gist of his doctrine; but the instant abolition of such
distances had been proved by many experiments to be a vain dream, and
the diminution of them must be gradual and slow. That such diminution
would go on till the distances should ultimately disappear in some
future millennium was to him a certainty. The distances were being
diminished by the increasing wisdom and philanthropy of mankind. To
him, born to high rank and great wealth, it had been given to do more
perhaps than another. In surrendering there is more efficacy, as
there is also more grace, than in seizing. What of his grandeur he
might surrender without injury to others to whom he was bound, he
would surrender. Of what exact nature or kind should be the woman
whom it might please him to select as his wife, he had formed no
accurate idea; but he would endeavour so to marry that he would make
no step down in the world that might be offensive to his family, but
would yet satisfy his own convictions by drawing himself somewhat
away from aristocratic blood. His father had done the same when
choosing his first wife, and the happiness of his choice would have
been perfect had not death interfered. A