“The Governor shows the strain,” said Corinna.  “I saw him yesterday.”

“How can he help it?  He has got himself into a tight place.  Oh, there are times when temporizing is more dangerous than action!  It’s hard to see how he’ll get out of it unless he cuts a way, and if he does that, he’ll probably lose the strongest support he has ever had.”

Stephen’s face was transfigured now.  It had lost the look of dryness, of apathy; and she watched the glow of health shine again in his eyes as it used to shine when he was at college.  So it was not emotion that was to restore him!  It was the ancient masculine delusion, as invulnerable as truth, that the impersonal interests are the significant ones.  Well, she was not quarrelling with delusions as long as they were beneficent!  And since it was impossible for her fervent soul to care greatly for general principles, or to dwell long among impersonal forms of thought, she found herself regarding this public crisis, less as a warfare of political theories, than as a possible cure for Stephen’s condition.  For the rest, except for their results, beneficial or otherwise, to the individual citizen, problems of government interested her not at all.  The whole trouble with life seemed to her to rise, not from mistaken theory, but from the lack of consideration with which human beings treated one another.  Happiness, after all, depended so little upon opinions and so much upon manners.

“Throw yourself into this work, Stephen,” she urged.  “It is a splendid opportunity.”

He smiled at her in the old boyish way.  “An opportunity for what?”

“For—­” It was on the tip of her tongue to say “for health”; but she checked herself, remembering the incurable distaste men have for calling things by their right names, and replied instead, “an opportunity for usefulness.”

His smile faded, and he turned on her eyes that were almost melancholy, though the fire of animation still warmed them.  “I am interested now.  I care a great deal—­but will it last?  Haven’t I felt this way a hundred times in the last six months, only to grow indifferent and even bored within the next few hours?”

She looked at him closely.  “Isn’t there any feeling—­any interest that lasts with you?”

He hesitated, while a burning colour, like the flush of fever, swept up to his forehead.  “Only one, and I am trying to get over that,” he answered after a moment.

“If it is a genuine feeling, are you wise to get over it?” she asked.  “Genuine feeling is so rare.  I think if I could feel an overwhelming emotion, I should hug it to my heart as the most precious of gifts.”

“Even if everything were against it?”

Her head went up with a dauntless gesture.  “Oh, my dear, what is everything?” It was a changed voice from the one in which she had lectured Alice Rokeby an hour ago.  “Feeling is everything.”

“It is real,” he replied, looking away from her eyes.  “I am sure of that because I have struggled against it.  I can’t explain what it is; I don’t know what it was that made me care in the beginning.  All I know about it is that it seems to give me back myself.  It is only when I let myself go in the thought of it that I become really free.  Can you understand what I mean?”