psychology became all the more a puzzle to me, and
I asked myself, with some impatience, what I would be at, and what it
was I really wanted.

Here had I but a few moments ago been holding in my hands the very
dream I had set out to find, and here was I secretly rejoicing to be
robbed of it! If Nicolete did not fulfil the conditions of that
mystical Golden Girl, in professed search for whom I had set out that
spring morning, well, the good genius of my pilgrimage felt it time to
resign. Better give it up at once, and go back to my books and my
bachelorhood, if I were so difficult to please. No wonder my kind
providence felt provoked. It had provided me with the sweetest
pink-and-porcelain dream of a girl, and might reasonably have concluded
that his labours on my behalf were at an end.

But, really, there is no need to lecture me upon the charms and virtues
of Nicolete, for I loved them from the first moment of our strange
introduction, and I dream of them still. There was indeed only one
quality of womanhood in which she was lacking, and in which, after much
serious self-examination, I discovered the reason of my instinctive
self-sacrifice of her,--SHE HAD NEVER SUFFERED. As my heart had warned
me at the beginning, "she was hoping too much from life to spend one's
days with." She lacked the subtle half-tones of experience. She lacked
all that a pretty wrinkle or two might have given. There was no
shadowy melancholy in her sky-clear eyes. She was gay indeed, and had
a certain childish humour; but she had none of that humour which comes
of the resigned perception that the world is out of joint, and that you
were never born to set it right. These characteristics I had yet to
find in woman. There was still, therefore, an object to my quest.
Indeed my experience had provided me with a formula. I was in search
of a woman who, in addition to every other feminine charm and virtue,
was a woman who had suffered.

With this prayer I turned once more to the genius of my pilgrimage.
"Grant me," I asked, "but this--A WOMAN WHO HAS SUFFERED!" and,
apparently as a consequence, he became once more quite genial. He
seemed to mean that a prayer so easy to grant would put any god into a
good temper; and possibly he smiled with a deeper meaning too.

BOOK III

CHAPTER I

IN WHICH I RETURN TO MY RIGHT AGE AND ENCOUNTER A COMMON OBJECT OF THE
COUNTRY

And so when the days of my mourning for Nicolete were ended (