Georgie slowly kissed his ruffled head, and then started to try and tie the longer hairs on the crown into tight knots.  He twisted his head away and sat up, laughing.  “If that’s how you’re going to treat me when I’m being your child,” he threatened, “I’ll—­”

“You’ll what?” asked Georgie.

Ishmael did precisely what every other lover in the world would have done in answer to that question at that moment.  Later, when the sun had moved high and they scrambled up to go home, Georgie was the laughing child again; only for a second, as they stood on the ridge above and looked down to the silvery patch where the bright grass was flattened where they had lain, she wore the look that had transfigured her before.

In the early autumn Ishmael married, and a new phase began for him at Cloom.  For the first years his precision of them held very true, except that, though they held more of deep and actual satisfaction than he had imagined, the moments of rapture were less glamorous.

Ishmael was one of those unlucky and rare people to whom everything has lost poignancy when it is occurring not for the first time.  He knew how far dearer to him was Georgie than Blanche had ever been—­how far more lovable she was.  But his love had not the keenness, the exquisite sharpness, of the earlier love, because that first time had taken from him what in spite of himself he could not give again.  If Georgie had left him he would not have suffered the agonies he had lived down after Blanche had gone.

In the same way he loved Georgie incomparably more than Phoebe, and between them passion was a deeper though not a sweeter thing; yet never again was he to feel the abandon that had delighted and finally satiated him with Phoebe.  His relation towards any other human being could never now stretch from rim to rim of the world for him as had so nearly been the case when he loved Blanche.  No one thing could seem to him to overtop all others as he had tried to make it in the first months with Phoebe.

As time went on there came about many measures of which he was as keen an advocate as he had been of school reform and the ballot, yet never did he recapture that first fine glow which had fired him at his entry into the world of men who worked at these things.  He believed as time went on, more firmly, because more vitally, in God and the future of the soul than ever he had in his fervid schooldays, yet these beliefs aroused less enthusiasm of response within him.

He could still feel as strongly in body, soul or mind, but never did he have those flashing periods when all three are fused together in that one white passion of feeling which is the genius of youth.  Always one of the three stood aloof, the jarring spectator in the trinity, and affected the quality of what the other two might feel.  Life, as he went through its midway, seemed to him to disintegrate, not to move inevitably towards any one culmination of its varied pattern.  When he had been young he lived by what might happen any golden to-morrow; now he lived by what did happen day by day.