Mr. Hardy or George Gissing might have found a theme. I do but half
listen at first--watching the black figures in the moonlit roadway
pacing to and fro. Yet--I cannot trace how he conveys the subtle
conviction to my mind--the woman he loves is beautiful.

They were boy and girl together, and afterwards they met again as
fellow students in a world of comfortable discretions. He seems to
have taken the decorums of life with a confiding good faith, to have
been shy and innocent in a suppressed sort of way, and of a mental
type not made for worldly successes; but he must have dreamt about
her and loved her well enough. How she felt for him I could never
gather; it seemed to be all of that fleshless friendliness into
which we train our girls. Then abruptly happened stresses. The man
who became her husband appeared, with a very evident passion. He was
a year or so older than either of them, and he had the habit and
quality of achieving his ends; he was already successful, and with
the promise of wealth, and I, at least, perceived, from my
botanist's phrasing, that his desire was for her beauty.

As my botanist talked I seemed to see the whole little drama, rather
clearer than his words gave it me, the actors all absurdly in
Hampstead middle-class raiment, meetings of a Sunday after church
(the men in silk hats, frock coats, and tightly-rolled umbrellas),
rare excursions into evening dress, the decorously vulgar fiction
read in their homes, its ambling sentimentalities of thought, the
amiably worldly mothers, the respectable fathers, the aunts, the
"people"--his "people" and her "people"--the piano music and the
song, and in this setting our friend, "quite clever" at botany and
"going in" for it "as a profession," and the girl, gratuitously
beautiful; so I figured the arranged and orderly environment into