He was certainly falling more and more into what more people call love. As to what he meant he did not himself know. How little regard there may be in that for the other apart from the self I will not now inquire. When intoxicated with the idea of her, that is when thinking what a sensation she would make in his grand little circle, he felt it impossible to live without her. Some way must be found! Had he anything worthy the name of property coming with the title that would be his, he would have proposed to her at once, he told himself. But it would be raging madness, even with the most beautiful wife in the world, to encounter an earldom without a penny. And her family could not have great money. No one with anything would slave as the governor did from morning till night. To marry her would be to live on his salary, in a small house in St. John’s wood, or Park Village, ride home in the omnibus every night like one in a tin of sardines, wear half-crown gloves, cotton socks, and cheap hats. The prospect was too hideous even to be ludicrous! No, there must be some way other than that. Thus would Vavasor’s emotions work themselves back and forth.

It was some time before he risked an attempt to please her with a song of his own. There was just enough unconscious truth in him to make him a little afraid of Hester. Commonplace as were the channels in which his thoughts ran, he would still not risk encountering her scorn. He knew she was capable of it, for Hester had not yet gathered the sweet gentleness that comes of long breathing the air of the high countries. It is generally many years before a strong character learns to think of itself as it ought to think. While there is left in us the possibility of scorn, we know not quite the spirit we are of—still less if we imagine we may keep this or that little shadow of a fault.

But Vavasor had come to understand Hester so far as to know her likes and dislikes in a song. And so, by degrees, he had resolved to venture something that would please her. He flattered himself that he knew her style. He was very fond of the word, and imagined that all writers and speakers and musicians, to be of any worth, must fashion their style after this or that great master. How the master got it, and whether it might not be best to go back to the seed rather than propagate any more by cutting, it never occurred to him to ask. He never thought about having something worth saying or writing or singing. If you had told him this, and he had, as he thought, perceived the truth of it, he would immediately have desired some fine thing to say, in order that he might say it well! He could not have been persuaded that, if one has nothing worth saying, the best possible style for him is nothing but a foolish utterance from an empty skull. To make a good speech was the grand thing! What side it was on, the right or the wrong, mattered nothing. Even whether the speaker believed what he said was of no consequence—except that, if he did not, his speech would be the more admirable, as the greater tour de force, and himself the more admirable as the cleverer fellow.