le as
a candidate for a place in the list of Gertrude's soulful friends.
When Paul reached Paris he had an immediate introduction to this young
gentleman, and conceived a real liking for him. There was hardly an
escape from the recognition of the fact that Mr. Janes, in his serious,
romantic way, was in love with Gertrude, but it was evident that he had
been held well in hand, and that with him the platonic path had strict
barriers, beyond which he did not even aspire to pass. He made Paul his
confidant when the two came to intimacy, as they very easily did; and
from his simple talk the elder learned again a great deal of what he had
learned already from Gertrude--how, for instance, there was a certain
isolation of the soul from which it was impossible to escape even in the
closest and most genuine friendship, and how the Individual was never
truly apprehended by any other Individual, but was doomed to go its
way in eternal solitude towards its goal. Mr. Janes, despite his
romanticisms and enthusiasms, was in the main a sensible young man, and
he would not have said these things had he known or guessed that
their ground of inspiration would be recognised by his companion. But
Gertrude's ideas had seemed to him--they would appear to have seemed
so to many for a time--to hold a most true and beautiful though sad
philosophy, and he was of that time of life when such thoughts are
full of serious interest and charm. Had Mr. Janes appeared nine months
earlier under the same conditions, Paul would probably have conceived
a fiery hatred for him, but now he felt a kind of superiority to
him, which was in part cynical, and in part affectionate, and in part
self-disdainful. He had gone thrilling at all this for years on end,
because it came from the lips of a pretty and engaging woman, with
whom it was no more than a canting shibboleth. Of course it helped to
disillusionize him, and he began even to see that Gertrude was not as
beautiful as he had once believed her to be. This is almost a fatal
symptom in the history of love's decay, unless the perception be
attended, as it is in happy cases, by the perception of new beauties
whose presence more than atones for the absence of the old. And Paul
did not find new beauties. Gertrude was simply a pretty woman now, and a
pretty woman is a very different creature from an angel whose effulgence
so dazzles that it blinds the eyes. It was pleasant enough to philander
with her, to touch the s