in certain respects he believed that it had finally determined
the bias and colour of his life. Now, however, it seemed that his inward peace
was hardly more stable than that of republican Florence, and his heart no better
than the alarm-bell that made work slack and tumult busy.
    Rex's love had been of that sudden, penetrating, clinging sort which the
ancients knew and sung, and in singing made a fashion of talk for many moderns
whose experience has been by no means of a fiery, dæmonic character. To have the
consciousness suddenly steeped with another's personality, to have the strongest
inclinations possessed by an image which retains its dominance in spite of
change and apart from worthiness - nay, to feel a passion which clings the
faster for the tragic pangs inflicted by a cruel, recognised unworthiness - is a
phase of love which in the feeble and common-minded has a repulsive likeness to
a blind animalism insensible to the higher sway of moral affinity or heaven-lit
admiration. But when this attaching force is present in a nature not of brutish
unmodifiableness, but of a human dignity that can risk itself safely, it may
even result in a devotedness not unfit to be called divine in a higher sense
than the ancient. Phlegmatic rationality stares and shakes its head at these
unaccountable prepossessions, but they exist as undeniably as the winds and
waves, determining here a wreck and there a triumphant voyage.
    This sort of passion had nested in the sweet-natured, strong Rex, and he had
made up his mind to its companionship, as if it had been an object supremely
dear, stricken dumb and helpless, and turning all the future of tenderness into
a shadow of the past. But he had also made up his mind that his life was not to
be pauperised because he had had to renounce one sort of joy; rather, he had
begun life again with a new counting-up of the treasures that remained to him,
and he had even felt a release of power such as may come from ceasing to be
afraid of your own neck.
    And now, here he was pacing the shrubbery, angry with himself that the sense
of irrevocableness in his lot, which ought in reason to have been as strong as
ever, had been shaken by a change of circumstances that could make no change in
relation to him. He told himself the truth quite roughly -
    »She would never love me; and that is not the question - I could never
approach her as a lover in her present position. I am exactly of no consequence
at all, and am not likely to