Thus his challenge came as an experience both less and greater than love.  It was less, in that no such challenge can be so urgent and so mighty as the call of hungry hearts to each other; it was greater, because the interests involved were built on abiding principles.  They arrested her intellectual ambitions and pointed to a sphere of usefulness beyond her unaided power.  What must have made his prosaic offer flat in the ear of an amorous woman, edged it for her.  He had dwelt on the aspect of their union that was likely most to attract her.

There was a pure personal side where love came in and made her heart beat warmly enough; but, higher than that, she saw herself of living value to Raymond and helping him just where he stood most in need of help.  She believed that they might well prove the complement of each other in those duties, disciplines, and obligations to which life had called them.

That night she went closely, searchingly over old ground again from the new point of vision.  What had always been interesting to her, became now vital, since these characteristics belonged to the man who wanted to wed her.  She tried to be remorseless and cruel that she might be kind.  But the palette of thought was only set with pleasant colours.  She had been intellectually in love with him for a long time, and he had offered problems which made her love him for the immense interest they gave her.  Now came additional stimulus in the knowledge that he loved her well enough to share his life, his hopes, and his ambitions with her.

She believed they might be wedded in very earnest.  He was masterful and possessed self-assurance; but what man can lead and control without these qualities?  His self-assurance was less than his self-control, and his instinct for self-assertion had nearly always been counted by a kind heart.  It seemed to her that she had never known a man who balanced reason and feeling more judicially, or better preserved a mean between them.

She had found that men could differentiate in a way beyond woman’s power and be unsociable if their duty demanded it.  But to be unsociable is not to be unsocial.  Raymond took long views, and if his old, genial and jolly attitude to life was a thing of the past, there had been substituted for it a wiser understanding and saner recognition of the useful and useless.  Men did take longer views than women—­so Estelle decided:  and there Raymond would help her; but the all-important matter that night was to satisfy herself how much she could help him.  In this reverie she found such warmth and light as set her glowing before dawn, for she built up the spiritual picture of Raymond, came very close to its ultimate realities, quickened by the new inspiration, and found that it should be well within her power to serve him generously.  She took no credit to herself, but recognized a happy accident of character.

There were weak spots in all masculine armour, that only a woman could make strong, and by a good chance she felt that her particular womanhood might serve this essential turn for Raymond’s manhood.  To strengthen her own man’s weak spots—­surely that was the crown and completion of any wedded life for a woman.  To check, to supplement, to enrich:  that he would surely do for her; and she hoped to deal as faithfully with him.