It was this immobile complacency of hers in the face of his own profound and sundering agitations that stirred in Rickman the first stinging of remorse.  For he could see that the poor Beaver, with her blind and ineradicable instinct, was going on building—­you couldn’t call them castles in the air—­but houses such as Beavers build, houses of mud in running water.  Her ceaseless winding in and out of shops, her mad and furious buying of furniture, her wild grasping at any loose articles that came in her way, from rugs to rolling-pins, appeared to him as so many futile efforts to construct a dam.  Over and over again the insane impulse came on him to seize her little hands and stop her; to tell her that it was no good, that the absurd thing could never stand, that he alone knew the strength of the stream, its sources and its currents.  But he hadn’t the heart to tell her, and the Beaver went on constructing her dam, without knowing that it was a dam, because she was born with the passion thus to build.

She could not see that anything had happened, and Heaven forbid that he should let her see.  He might abandon hope, but the Beaver he could not abandon.  That was not to be thought of for an instant.  He was too deeply pledged for that.  Lest he should be in danger of forgetting, it was brought home to him a dozen times a day.

The very moment when Flossie was making that triumphant display of her wedding finery he had caught a glimpse of her (iniquitously) as he passed her room on his way to Spinks’s.  She was standing, a jubilant little figure, in the line of the half-open door, shaking out and trailing before her some white, shiny, frilly thing, the sight of which made him shudder for the terror, and sigh for the pity of it.  And the girls’ laughter and the banging of the door as he went by, what was it but a reminder of the proprieties and decencies that bound him?  A hint that he had pledged himself thrice over by that unlawful peep?

It seemed to him that was the beginning of many unlawful glimpses, discoveries of things he ought never to have seen.  Was it that he was more quick to see?  Or that Flossie was less careful than she had been?  Or was it simply the result of living in this detestable boarding-house, where, morally speaking, the doors were never shut?  Propinquity, that had brought them together, had done its best for Flossie and its worst.  It had revealed too little and too much.  He had only to forget her for a week, to come back and see her as she really was; to wonder what he had ever seen in her.  Her very prettiness offended him.  Her flagrantly feminine contours, once admired, now struck him as exaggerated, as an emphasis of the charm which is most subduing when subdued.  As for her mind, good Heavens!  Had it taken him five years to discover that her mind was a cul de sac?  When he came to think of it, he had to own that intellectually, conversationally even, he had advanced no farther with her than on the first