he was
here caught firmly in the toils of the first passion of his manhood. The
May Gold episode and the Claudie Belmont episode had long been things to
laugh at. Marriage had turned out an unredeemed tragedy, which had never
had even the poor excuse of a passing infatuation behind it He had never
loved Annette, and she was fast growing into a terror and an aversion.
And now all this tomfoolery of telepathic communion, this wilful
brooding over an absent woman, this summoning of her features to mind,
this recalling of her tones, this yearning in which his own soul seemed
to beat its mortal bars in the strife to draw her spirit near, made
a clean end of the platonic theory so far as he was concerned. The
Baroness, at her end of the spirit-wire, appears to have been less
potently disturbed. Perhaps she took less pains to disturb herself;
possibly she took none whatever.

It came at last on Paul's side to amount to something very like a
possession. Night and day his thoughts hovered about her. He would not
admit to his mind one dishonouring thought of her.

'Charlotte was a married woman, and a moral man was Werther,
And for all the wealth of Indies would do nothing for to hurt her.'

And Gertrude was a married woman also, and Paul--who had not too rigidly
obeyed the precepts of morality in his day--was bent on honour in
this instance. He wrote reams of letters, all of which might have been
printed without harm to anybody; but by-and-by his passion began to
carry him off his feet, as passion has carried stronger men than he, and
the fever of his pulses got into his ink, and he began to make love, but
with a dreadful guardedness and a deadly fear lest he should offend
the susceptibilities of this creature of the skies. She rebuked him
by implication and in a parable. She had had a mournful letter from a
friend in Boston, an old and valued correspondent, a lady whose domestic
relations were of the saddest sort, who had long believed herself to
have established a pure and tender friendship with a person of the
opposite sex, and who had now been shocked and horrified beyond measure
by a proposal of elopement How rare a genuine friendship between men and
women seemed to be! How happy was she in the security she enjoyed in
the solidity of his character, in that delicacy of mind and heart which
permitted the most delightful intimacies of thought without danger. He
wrote back fiercely that he was unworthy of the confid