Meanwhile he was beginning to show a presentable face to the world, and to be once more treated like a man in whose case no one is particularly interested.  His men friends ceased to say:  “Hallo, old chap, I never saw you looking fitter!” and elderly ladies no longer told him they were sure he kept too much to himself, and urged him to drop in any afternoon for a quiet talk.  People left him to his sorrow as a man is left to an incurable habit, an unfortunate tie:  they ignored it, or looked over its head if they happened to catch a glimpse of it at his elbow.

These glimpses were given to them more and more rarely.  The smothered springs of life were bubbling up in Ralph, and there were days when he was glad to wake and see the sun in his window, and when he began to plan his book, and to fancy that the planning really interested him.  He could even maintain the delusion for several days—­for intervals each time appreciably longer—­before it shrivelled up again in a scorching blast of disenchantment.  The worst of it was that he could never tell when these hot gusts of anguish would overtake him.  They came sometimes just when he felt most secure, when he was saying to himself:  “After all, things are really worth while—­” sometimes even when he was sitting with Clare Van Degen, listening to her voice, watching her hands, and turning over in his mind the opening chapters of his book.

“You ought to write”; they had one and all said it to him from the first; and he fancied he might have begun sooner if he had not been urged on by their watchful fondness.  Everybody wanted him to write—­everybody had decided that he ought to, that he would, that he must be persuaded to; and the incessant imperceptible pressure of encouragement—­the assumption of those about him that because it would be good for him to write he must naturally be able to—­acted on his restive nerves as a stronger deterrent than disapproval.

Even Clare had fallen into the same mistake; and one day, as he sat talking with her on the verandah of Laura Fairford’s house on the Sound—­where they now most frequently met—­Ralph had half-impatiently rejoined:  “Oh, if you think it’s literature I need—!”

Instantly he had seen her face change, and the speaking hands tremble on her knee.  But she achieved the feat of not answering him, or turning her steady eyes from the dancing mid-summer water at the foot of Laura’s lawn.  Ralph leaned a little nearer, and for an instant his hand imagined the flutter of hers.  But instead of clasping it he drew back, and rising from his chair wandered away to the other end of the verandah...No, he didn’t feel as Clare felt.  If he loved her—­as he sometimes thought he did—­it was not in the same way.  He had a great tenderness for her, he was more nearly happy with her than with any one else; he liked to sit and talk with her, and watch her face and her hands, and he wished there were some way—­some different way—­of letting her know it; but he could not conceive that tenderness and desire could ever again be one for him:  such a notion as that seemed part of the monstrous sentimental muddle on which his life had gone aground.