hen they met they
were still fairly intimate. They had some real regard for each
other. Carey felt at ease in giving his violence to the quiet and
self-possessed young secretary, who was three years his junior, but who
sometimes seemed to him the elder of the two, perhaps because calm is
essentially the senior of storm. He had even allowed Robin to guess
at the truth of his feeling for Lady Holme, though he had never been
explicit, on the subject to him or to anyone. There were moments
when Robin wished he had not been permitted to guess, for Lady Holme
attracted him far more than any other woman he had seen, and he had
proposed to her before she had been carried off by her husband. He
admired her beauty, but he did not believe that it was her beauty which
had led him into love. He was sure that he loved the woman in her,
the hidden woman whom Lord Holme and the world at large--including
Carey--knew nothing about. He thought that Lady Holme herself did not
understand this hidden woman, did not realise, as he did, that she
existed. She spoke to him sometimes in Lady Holme's singing, sometimes
in an expression in her eyes when she was serious, sometimes even in
a bodily attitude. For Robin, half fantastically, put faith in the
eloquence of line as a revealer of character, of soul. But she did not
speak to him in Lady Holme's conversation. He really thought this hidden
woman was obscured by the lovely window--he conceived it as a window of
exquisite stained glass, jewelled but concealing--through which she was
condemned to look for ever, through which, too, all men must look at
her. He really wished sometimes, as he had said, that Lady Holme were
ugly, for he had a fancy that perhaps then, and only then, would
the hidden woman arise and be seen as a person may be seen through
unstained, clear glass. He really felt that what he loved would be there
to love if the face that ruled was ruined; would not only still be
there to love, but would become more powerful, more true to itself, more
understanding of itself, more reliant, purer, braver. And he had learnt
to cherish this fancy till it had become a little monomania. Robin
thought that the world misunderstood him, but he knew the world too well
to say so. He never risked being laughed at. He felt sure that he
was passionate, that he was capable of romantic deeds, of Quixotic
self-sacrifice, of a devotion that might well be sung by poets, and that
would certainly be worshipped