Romantic, indeed, the position was, for romance rests on contrast.  Jacob, who knew Julie Le Breton’s secret, was thrilled or moved by the contrasts of her existence at every turn.  Her success and her subjection; the place in Lady Henry’s circle which Lady Henry had, in the first instance, herself forced her to take, contrasted with the shifts and evasions, the poor, tortuous ways by which, alas! she must often escape Lady Henry’s later jealousy; her intellectual strength and her most feminine weaknesses; these things stirred and kept up in Jacob a warm and passionate pity.  The more clearly he saw the specks in her glory, the more vividly did she appear to him a princess in distress, bound by physical or moral fetters not of her own making.  None of the well-born, well-trained damsels who had been freely thrown across his path had so far beguiled him in the least.  Only this woman of doubtful birth and antecedents, lonely, sad, and enslaved amid what people called her social triumphs, stole into his heart—­beautified by what he chose to consider her misfortunes, and made none the less attractive by the fact that as he pursued, she retreated; as he pressed, she grew cold.

When, indeed, after their friendship had lasted about a year, he proposed to her and she refused him, his passion, instead of cooling, redoubled.  It never occurred to him to think that she had done a strange thing from the worldly point of view—­that would have involved an appreciation of himself, as a prize in the marriage market, he would have loathed to make.  But he was one of the men for whom resistance enhances the value of what they desire, and secretly he said to himself, “Persevere!” When he was repelled or puzzled by certain aspects of her character, he would say to himself: 

“It is because she is alone and miserable.  Women are not meant to be alone.  What soft, helpless creatures they are!—­even when intellectually they fly far ahead of us.  If she would but put her hand in mine I would so serve and worship her, she would have no need for these strange things she does—­the doublings and ruses of the persecuted.”  Thus the touches of falsity that repelled Wilfrid Bury were to Delafield’s passion merely the stains of rough travel on a fair garment.

But she refused him, and for another year he said no more.  Then, as things got worse and worse for her, he spoke again—­ambiguously—­a word or two, thrown out to sound the waters.  Her manner of silencing him on this second occasion was not what it had been before.  His suspicions were aroused, and a few days later he divined the Warkworth affair.

When Sir Wilfrid Bury spoke to him of the young officer’s relations to Mademoiselle Le Breton, Delafield’s stiff defence of Julie’s prerogatives in the matter masked the fact that he had just gone through a week of suffering, wrestling his heart down in country lanes; a week which had brought him to somewhat curious results.