He had thought himself, so long as nobody knew, the most disinterested person in the world, carrying his concentrated burden, his perpetual suspense, ever so quietly, holding his tongue about it, giving others no glimpse of it nor of its effect upon his life, asking of them no allowance and only making on his side all those that were asked.  He hadn’t disturbed people with the queerness of their having to know a haunted man, though he had had moments of rather special temptation on hearing them say they were forsooth “unsettled.”  If they were as unsettled as he was—­he who had never been settled for an hour in his life—­they would know what it meant.  Yet it wasn’t, all the same, for him to make them, and he listened to them civilly enough.  This was why he had such good—­though possibly such rather colourless—­manners; this was why, above all, he could regard himself, in a greedy world, as decently—­as in fact perhaps even a little sublimely—­unselfish.  Our point is accordingly that he valued this character quite sufficiently to measure his present danger of letting it lapse, against which he promised himself to be much on his guard.  He was quite ready, none the less, to be selfish just a little, since surely no more charming occasion for it had come to him.  “Just a little,” in a word, was just as much as Mss Bartram, taking one day with another, would let him.  He never would be in the least coercive, and would keep well before him the lines on which consideration for her—­the very highest—­ought to proceed.  He would thoroughly establish the heads under which her affairs, her requirements, her peculiarities—­he went so far as to give them the latitude of that name—­would come into their intercourse.  All this naturally was a sign of how much he took the intercourse itself for granted.  There was nothing more to be done about that.  It simply existed; had sprung into being with her first penetrating question to him in the autumn light there at Weatherend.  The real form it should have taken on the basis that stood out large was the form of their marrying.  But the devil in this was that the very basis itself put marrying out of the question.  His conviction, his apprehension, his obsession, in short, wasn’t a privilege he could invite a woman to share; and that consequence of it was precisely what was the matter with him.  Something or other lay in wait for him, amid the twists and the turns of the months and the years, like a crouching Beast in the Jungle.  It signified little whether the crouching Beast were destined to slay him or to be slain.  The definite point was the inevitable spring of the creature; and the definite lesson from that was that a man of feeling didn’t cause himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger-hunt.  Such was the image under which he had ended by figuring his life.