comfort rather than as creating complications.

Up to this minute he had seemed to withdraw from her, to elude her. As a
matter of fact, though she spoke of him rarely and always with a
purposely prosaic touch, he was so romantic a figure in her dreams that
the approach of the sordid and the ugly had dispelled his image. It was
quite true, as she had said to Drusilla Fane, that from one point of
view she didn't know him very well. She might have said that she didn't
know him at all on any of those planes where rents and the price of beef
are factors. He had come into her life with much the same sort of appeal
as the wandering knight of the days of chivalry made to the damsel in
the family fortress. Up to his appearing she had thought herself too
sophisticated and too old to be caught by this kind of fancy, especially
as it was not the first time she had been exposed to it. In the person
of Rupert Ashley, however, it presented itself with the requisite
limitations and accompaniments. He was neither so young nor so rich nor
of such high rank as to bring a disproportionate element into their
romance, while at the same time he had all the endowments of looks,
birth, and legendary courage that the heroine craves in the hero. When
he was not actually under her eyes, her imagination embodied him most
easily in the _svelte_ elegance of the King Arthur beside Maximilian's
tomb at Innspruck.

Their acquaintance had been brief, but illuminating--one of those
friendships that can afford to transcend the knowledge of mere outward
personal facts to leap to the things of the heart and the spirit. It was
one of the commonplaces of their intimate speech together that they
"seemed to have known each other always"; but now that it was necessary
for her to possess some practical measure of his character, she saw,
with a sinking of the heart, that they had never passed beyond the stage