s born with the passion thus to build.

She could not see that anything had happened, and Heaven forbid that
he should let her see. He might abandon hope, but the Beaver he could
not abandon. That was not to be thought of for an instant. He was too
deeply pledged for that. Lest he should be in danger of forgetting, it
was brought home to him a dozen times a day.

The very moment when Flossie was making that triumphant display of her
wedding finery he had caught a glimpse of her (iniquitously) as he
passed her room on his way to Spinks's. She was standing, a jubilant
little figure, in the line of the half-open door, shaking out and
trailing before her some white, shiny, frilly thing, the sight of
which made him shudder for the terror, and sigh for the pity of it.
And the girls' laughter and the banging of the door as he went by,
what was it but a reminder of the proprieties and decencies that bound
him? A hint that he had pledged himself thrice over by that unlawful
peep?

It seemed to him that was the beginning of many unlawful glimpses,
discoveries of things he ought never to have seen. Was it that he was
more quick to see? Or that Flossie was less careful than she had been?
Or was it simply the result of living in this detestable
boarding-house, where, morally speaking, the doors were never shut?
Propinquity, that had brought them together, had done its best for
Flossie and its worst. It had revealed too little and too much. He had
only to forget her for a week, to come back and see her as she really
was; to wonder what he had ever seen in her. Her very prettiness
offended him. Her flagrantly feminine contours, once admired, now
struck him as exaggerated, as an emphasis of the charm which is most
subduing when subdued. As for her mind, good Heavens! Had it taken him
five years to discover that her mind was a _cul de sac_? When he came
to think of it, he had to own that intellectually, conversationally
even, he had advanced no farther with her than on the first day of
their acquaintance. There was something compact and immovable about
Flossie. In those five years he had never known her change or modify
an opinion of people or of things. And yet Flossie was not stupid, or
if she were her stupidity was a force; it had an invincible impetus
and sweep, dragging the dead weight of character behind it. It was
beginning to terrify him. In fact he was becoming painfully sensitive
to everything she said or did. Her little to