esence of
others. What friends she had--the people who so stupidly, so wantonly
stuck! If they _should_, he and she, come to an understanding, that
would presumably have to include certain members of her singularly
ill-composed circle, in whom it was incredible to him that he should
ever take an interest. This defeat, to do himself justice--he had bent
rather predominantly on _that_, you see; ideal justice to _her_, with
her possible conception of what it should consist of, being another and
quite a different matter--he had had the fact of the Sunday afternoon to
thank for; she didn't "keep" that day for him, since they hadn't, up to
now, quite begun to cultivate the appointment or assignation founded
on explicit sacrifices. He might at any rate look to find this pleasant
practical Wednesday--should he indeed, at his actual rate, stay it
before it ebbed--more liberally and intendingly given him.

The sound he at last most wittingly distinguished in his nook was the
single deep note of half-past five borne to him from some high-perched
public clock. He finally got up with the sense that the time from then
on _ought_ at least to be felt as sacred to him. At this juncture it
was--while he stood there shaking his garments, settling his hat, his
necktie, his shirt-cuffs, fixing the high polish of his fine shoes as
if for some reflection in it of his straight and spare and grizzled, his
refined and trimmed and dressed, his altogether distinguished person,
that of a gentleman abundantly settled, but of a bachelor markedly
nervous--at this crisis it was, doubtless, that he at once most measured
and least resented his predicament. If he should go he would almost to
a certainty find her, and if he should find her he would almost to a
certainty come to the point. He wouldn't put it off again--there was
that high consideration for him of justice at least to himself. He
had never yet denied himself anything so apparently fraught with
possibilities as the idea of proposing to Mrs. Worthingham--never yet,
in other words, denied himself anything he had so distinctly wanted to
do; and the results of that wisdom had remained for him precisely the
precious parts of experience. Counting only the offers of his honourable
hand, these had been on three remembered occasions at least the
consequence of an impulse as sharp and a self-respect as reasoned;
a self-respect that hadn't in the least suffered, moreover, from the
failure of each appeal.