pity for the sorrows and burdens that nature had laid upon them, for
their physical weakness, for their passive role in life. That beings so
hampered could yet play such tender and heroic parts was to him
perennially wonderful, and his sense of it expressed itself in an
unconscious homage that seemed to embrace the sex. That the homage was
not seldom wasted on persons quite unworthy of it, his best women
friends were not slow to see; but in this he was often obstinate and
took his own way.

This mingling in him of an unfailing interest in the sex with an entire
absence of personal craving, gave him a singularly strong position with
regard to women, of which he had never yet taken any selfish advantage;
largely, no doubt, because of the many activities, most of them
disinterested, by which his life was fed and freshened; as a lake is by
the streams which fill it.

He was much moved by his old friend's letter, and he walked about
pondering it, till the morning was almost gone. The girl's position
also seemed to him particularly friendless and perilous, though she
herself, apparently, would be the last person to think so, could she
only shake herself free from the worrying restrictions her father had
inflicted on her. Her letter, and its thinly veiled wrath, shewed quite
plainly that the task of any guardian would be a tough one. Miss
Blanchflower was evidently angry--very angry--yet at the same time
determined, if she could, to play a dignified part; ready, that is, to
be civil, on her own conditions. The proposal to instal as her
chaperon, instantly, without a day's delay, the very woman denounced in
her father's last letter, struck him as first outrageous, and then
comic. He laughed aloud over it.