Amorous and easily impressed as he was, her beauty drew him with its subtle charm, but his doubt and her pride interposed barriers which even he dared not disregard; and at the end of two months he was no nearer than at the beginning that understanding which he would have established with any other pretty woman in less than a week.  And he was no surer of himself and what he did really desire.  Yet, accustomed as he was to loves as easily won as the gathering of a flower by the wayside, and to the knowledge that Adelaide Birkett, his social match in all things, was ready to pick up the handkerchief when he should think fit to throw it, this very doubt both of himself and Leam made half the interest if all the perplexity of the situation.  He knew, as well as he knew that the Corinthian shaft should bear the Corinthian capital, if it was Leam whom he loved it was Adelaide whom he ought to marry.  She would carry incense to the gods of British respectability as a squire’s lady should, doing nothing that should not be done and leaving as little undone that should be done.  She would preside at the Hill dinners with grace and join the meet at the coverside with punctuality; she would dress as became her position, but neither extravagantly nor questionably, and she would be more likely to stint than to squander; she would live as a polite Christian should, in the odor of genteel righteousness, not a fibre laid cross to the conventional grain, not a note out of tune with the orthodox chord.  Yes, it was the rector’s daughter whom he ought to marry, but it was Pepita’s whom he loved.  Yet how would things go with such a perplexing iconoclast at the head of affairs?  Imagine the feelings of an English squire, M.H. of his county, loving dogs and horses as some women love children, and regarding poaching and vulpicide as crimes almost as bad as murder—­imagine his feelings when his beautiful wife, grave and simple, should say at a hunt-dinner, “I do not like riding.  I think hunting stupid and cruel:  an army of men in red coats after a poor little hare—­it is horrid!  I think poaching quite right.  God gave beasts and birds to us all alike, and your preserves are robberies.  I would like to save all the foxes, and I hate the dogs when they catch them;” for be sure she would never learn to call them hounds.  What would he feel?  It would be an incongruous kind of thing altogether, Edgar used to think when meditating on life as seen through the curling clouds of his cigar.

But he loved her—­he loved her:  daily with more passion, because daily holding a stronger check on himself, and so accumulating by concentration.  It was the old combat between love and reason, personal desires and social feelings, and as yet it was undecided which side would win.  Now it was Adelaide and her exact suitability for her part, when he would avoid Leam Dundas for days; now it was Leam and his fervid love for her, his passion of doubt, his fever of longing, when he would all but commit himself and tempt the fortune of the future irrevocably.