e the Lamps."

"But they will be all right," said Mrs. More.

"I can't trust 'em," said Restall, with a deepening gloom. "Not after
_that_." The motor-car looked self-conscious and uncomfortable, but said
nothing by way of excuse, and Restall took me off in it like one whose
sun has set for ever. "I wouldn't be surprised," said Restall as we went
down the drive, "if the damned thing turned a somersault. It might
do--anything." Those were the brighter days of motoring.

The next time I went over released from Restall's limitations, and
stayed to a jolly family supper. I found remarkably few obstacles in my
way to a better acquaintance with Rachel. You see I was an entirely
eligible and desirable young man in Mrs. More's eyes....

Sec. 4

When I recall these long past emotions again, I am struck by the
profound essential difference between my feelings for your mother and
for Mary. They were so different that it seems scarcely rational to me
that they should be called by the same name. Yet each was love,
profoundly deep and sincere. The contrast lies, I think, in our relative
ages, and our relative maturity; that altered the quality of all our
emotions. The one was the love of a man of six-and-twenty, exceptionally
seasoned and experienced and responsible for his years, for a girl still
at school, a girl attractively beautiful, mysterious and unknown to him;
the other was the love of coevals, who had been playmates and intimate
companions, and of whom the woman was certainly as capable and wilful as
the man.

Now it is exceptional for men to love women of their own age, it is the
commoner thing that they should love maidens younger and often much
younger than themselves. This is true more particularly of our own
class; the masculine thirties and forties marry the feminine twenties,
all the prevailing sentiment and usage between the sexes rises naturally
out of that. We treat this seniority as though it were a virile
characteristic; we treat the man as though he were a natural senior, we
expect a weakness, a timid deference, in the girl. I and Mary had loved
one another as two rivers run together on the way to the sea, we had
grown up side by side to the moment when we kissed; but I sought your
mother, I watched her and desired her and chose her, very tenderly and
worshipfully indeed, to be mine. I do not remember that there was any
corresponding intention in my mind to be hers. I do not think that that
idea came i