for more than forty years without having
heard and read of and even encountered in an acquaintance or two the
species of sex attraction sentimentally called love that sometimes made
fools of men and played havoc with more important affairs, but in his
experience it had never interfered with his sanity or his appetite or the
Chippering Mill: it had never made his cigars taste bitter; it had never
caused a deterioration in the appreciation of what he had achieved and
held. But now he was experiencing strange symptoms of an intensity out of
all proportion to that of former relations with the other sex. What was
most unusual for him, he was alarmed and depressed, at moments irritable.
He regretted the capricious and apparently accidental impulse that had
made him pretend to tinker with his automobile that day by the canal,
that had led him to the incomparable idiocy of getting rid of Miss Ottway
and installing the disturber of his peace as his private stenographer.

What the devil was it in her that made him so uncomfortable? When in his
office he had difficulty in keeping his mind on matters of import; he
would watch her furtively as she went about the room with the lithe and
noiseless movements that excited him the more because he suspected
beneath her outward and restrained demeanour a fierceness he craved yet
feared. He thought of her continually as a panther, a panther he had
caught and could not tame; he hadn't even caught her, since she might
escape at any time. He took precautions not to alarm her. When she
brushed against him he trembled. Continually she baffled and puzzled him,
and he never could tell of what she was thinking. She represented a whole
set of new and undetermined values for which he had no precedents, and
unlike every woman he had known--including his wife--she had an integrity
of her own, seemingly beyond the reach of all influences economic and
social. All the more exasperating, therefore, was a propinquity creating
an intimacy without substance, or without the substance he craved for she
had magically become for him a sort of enveloping, protecting atmosphere.
In an astonishingly brief time he had fallen into the habit of talking
things over with her; naturally not affairs of the first importance, but
matters such as the economy of his time: when, for instance, it was most
convenient for him to go to Boston; and he would find that she had
telephoned, without being told, to the office there when to