During the drive from Upton to Patterne, Miss Middleton hoped, she partly believed, that there was to be a change in Sir Willoughby’s manner of courtship.  He had been so different a wooer.  She remembered with some half-conscious desperation of fervour what she had thought of him at his first approaches, and in accepting him.  Had she seen him with the eyes of the world, thinking they were her own?  That look of his, the look of “indignant contentment”, had then been a most noble conquering look, splendid as a general’s plume at the gallop.  It could not have altered.  Was it that her eyes had altered?

The spirit of those days rose up within her to reproach, her and whisper of their renewal:  she remembered her rosy dreams and the image she had of him, her throbbing pride in him, her choking richness of happiness:  and also her vain attempting to be very humble, usually ending in a carol, quaint to think of, not without charm, but quaint, puzzling.

Now men whose incomes have been restricted to the extent that they must live on their capital, soon grow relieved of the forethoughtful anguish wasting them by the hilarious comforts of the lap upon which they have sunk back, insomuch that they are apt to solace themselves for their intolerable anticipations of famine in the household by giving loose to one fit or more of reckless lavishness.  Lovers in like manner live on their capital from failure of income:  they, too, for the sake of stifling apprehension and piping to the present hour, are lavish of their stock, so as rapidly to attenuate it:  they have their fits of intoxication in view of coming famine:  they force memory into play, love retrospectively, enter the old house of the past and ravage the larder, and would gladly, even resolutely, continue in illusion if it were possible for the broadest honey-store of reminiscences to hold out for a length of time against a mortal appetite:  which in good sooth stands on the alternative of a consumption of the hive or of the creature it is for nourishing.  Here do lovers show that they are perishable.  More than the poor clay world they need fresh supplies, right wholesome juices; as it were, life in the burst of the bud, fruits yet on the tree, rather than potted provender.  The latter is excellent for by-and-by, when there will be a vast deal more to remember, and appetite shall have but one tooth remaining.  Should their minds perchance have been saturated by their first impressions and have retained them, loving by the accountable light of reason, they may have fair harvests, as in the early time; but that case is rare.  In other words, love is an affair of two, and is only for two that can be as quick, as constant in intercommunication as are sun and earth, through the cloud or face to face.  They take their breath of life from one another in signs of affection, proofs of faithfulness, incentives to admiration.  Thus it is with men and women in love’s good season.  But a solitary soul dragging a log must make the log a God to rejoice in the burden.  That is not love.