'Yes!' she said, looking up into his face. Avice was perfectly happy
now; she could never have believed on that mortifying day of his coming
that she would be so happy with him. When they reached the east side
of the isle they parted, that she might be soon enough to take her
place on the platform. Pierston went home, and after dark, when it was
about the hour for accompanying her back, he went along the middle road
northward to the Street of Wells.

He was full of misgiving. He had known Avice Caro so well of old that
his feeling for her now was rather comradeship than love; and what he
had said to her in a moment of impulse that morning rather appalled him
in its consequences. Not that any of the more sophisticated and
accomplished women who had attracted him successively would be likely
to rise inconveniently between them. For he had quite disabused his
mind of the assumption that the idol of his fancy was an integral part
of the personality in which it had sojourned for a long or a short
while.


* * *


To his Well-Beloved he had always been faithful; but she had had many
embodiments. Each individuality known as Lucy, Jane, Flora,
Evangeline, or what-not, had been merely a transient condition of her.
He did not recognize this as an excuse or as a defence, but as a fact
simply. Essentially she was perhaps of no tangible substance; a
spirit, a dream, a frenzy, a conception, an aroma, an epitomized sex, a
light of the eye, a parting of the lips. God only knew what she really
was; Pierston did not. She was indescribable.