ME

Sometimes Sir James would confide in his secretary, and become after
dinner--he drank port--pompously communicative on the subject of the
alliances his daughter might contract--if she would. As he became more
and more confidential in fact, he would grow more and more distant in
manner, so that if they began dinner like old friends, they seemed
gradually to cool into acquaintances; and at the end of the
evening--such an evening!--Woodville felt as if they had barely been
introduced, or had met, accidentally, in a railway train. Yet he courted
these _tete-a-tete_ as one perversely courts a certain kind of
suffering. At least, Sir James talked on the _only_ interesting subject,
and Woodville was anxious to know everything about his rivals; for,
though he believed in Sylvia's affection, he was subject to acute,
almost morbid, attacks of physical jealousy. To see other men admire her
was torture, particularly as he had to efface himself and be treated by
her father as a faithful vassal.

And he really disliked deceiving Sir James, whose open liking was
evident and who thought him matrimonially as much out of the question as
the gardener.

"Hang it all, Woodville's a gentleman!" Sir James would have cried
furiously at any suggestion that it was imprudent to leave the young man
and Sylvia so much together. Sir James always remembered that Woodville
was a gentleman and forgot that he was a man.

Men who indulge in inexpensive cynicism say that women are complex and
difficult to understand. This may be true of an ambitious and hard
woman, but nothing can be more simple and direct than a woman in love.

Sylvia suffered none of Woodville's complications. She did not see why
he should want to run away with her, still less why he should run away
from her. Nothing could be wrong in her eyes connected with her love,
for it was also her religion. Like most girls who can love at all, her
life consisted, in fact, of this emotion only. She might go to the
stores, wave her hair, buy new hats, ride in the Park, order dinner for
her father (with great care, for he was a gourmet), read innumerable
books (generally falling back on Swinburne and Ella Wheeler Wilcox),
receive and meet innumerable people, go to the opera, and do many other
agreeable, tedious, or trivial things; but her life was her love for
Woodville. And she had all the courage and dignity of real
self-surrender. Whatever he did was right. Whatever he said was clever.