dim golden-brown promontories, with pale-green
grass at the top, stretching out one beyond another into the distance,
became for Howard a symbol of all that was most wonderful and perfect
in life.

He could not cease to marvel at the fact that this beautiful young
creature, full of tenderness and anxious care for others, and with love
the one pre-occupation of her life, should yield herself thus to him
with such an entire and happy abandonment. Maud seemed for the time to
have no will of her own, no thought except to please him; he could not
get her to express a single preference, and her guileless diplomacy to
discover what he preferred amused and delighted him. At the same time
the exploration of Maud's mind and thought was an entire surprise to
him--there was so much she did not know, so many things in the world,
which he took for granted, of which she had never heard; and yet in
many ways he discovered that she knew and perceived far more than he
did. Her judgment of people was penetrating and incisive, and was
formed quite instinctively, without any apparent reason; she had, too,
a charming gift of humour, and her affection for her own circle did not
in the least prevent her from perceiving their absurdities. She was not
all loyalty and devotion, nor did she pretend to be interested in
things for which she did not care. There were many conventions, which
Howard for the first time discovered that he himself unconsciously
held, which Maud did not think in the least important. Howard began to
see that he himself had really been a somewhat conventional person,
with a respect for success and position and dignity and influence. He
saw that his own chief motive had been never to do anything
disagreeable or unreasonable or original or decisive; he began to see
that his unconscious aim had been to fit himself without self-assertion
into his circle, and to make himself unobtrusively necessary to people.
Maud had no touch of this in her nature at all; her only ambition
seemed to be to be loved, which was accompanied by what seemed to
Howard a marvellous incapacity for being shocked by anything; she was
wholly innocent and ingenuous, but yet he found to his surprise that
she knew something of the dark corners of life, and the moral problems
of village life were a matter of course to her. He had naturally
supposed that a girl would have been fenced round by illusions; but it
was not so. She had seen and observed and drawn her c