effect upon his life, asking of them no
allowance and only making on his side all those that were asked. He
hadn't disturbed people with the queerness of their having to know a
haunted man, though he had had moments of rather special temptation on
hearing them say they were forsooth "unsettled." If they were as
unsettled as he was--he who had never been settled for an hour in his
life--they would know what it meant. Yet it wasn't, all the same, for
him to make them, and he listened to them civilly enough. This was why
he had such good--though possibly such rather colourless--manners; this
was why, above all, he could regard himself, in a greedy world, as
decently--as in fact perhaps even a little sublimely--unselfish. Our
point is accordingly that he valued this character quite sufficiently to
measure his present danger of letting it lapse, against which he promised
himself to be much on his guard. He was quite ready, none the less, to
be selfish just a little, since surely no more charming occasion for it
had come to him. "Just a little," in a word, was just as much as Miss
Bartram, taking one day with another, would let him. He never would be
in the least coercive, and would keep well before him the lines on which
consideration for her--the very highest--ought to proceed. He would
thoroughly establish the heads under which her affairs, her requirements,
her peculiarities--he went so far as to give them the latitude of that
name--would come into their intercourse. All this naturally was a sign
of how much he took the intercourse itself for granted. There was
nothing more to be done about that. It simply existed; had sprung into
being with her first penetrating question to him in the autumn light
there at Weatherend. The real form it should have taken on the basis
that stood out large was the form of their marrying. But the devil in
this was that the very basis itself put marrying out of the question. His
conviction, his apprehension, his obsession, in short, wasn't a privilege
he could invite a woman to share; and that consequence of it was
precisely what was the matter with him. Something or other lay in wait
for him, amid the twists and the turns of the months and the years, like
a crouching Beast in the Jungle. It signified little whether the
crouching Beast were destined to slay him or to be slain. The definite
point was the inevitable spring of the creature; and the definite lesson
from that was t