“Perfect love cherishes.  Perfect love foregoes.”

Sir Richmond found his mind wandering far away from the immediate question.  “Perfect love,” the phrase was his point of departure.  Was it true that he could not love passionately and completely?  Was that fundamentally what was the matter with him?  Was that perhaps what was the matter with the whole world of mankind?  It had not yet come to that power of loving which makes action full and simple and direct and unhesitating.  Man upon his planet has not grown up to love, is still an eager, egotistical and fluctuating adolescent.  He lacks the courage to love and the wisdom to love.  Love is here.  But it comes and goes, it is mixed with greeds and jealousies and cowardice and cowardly reservations.  One hears it only in snatches and single notes.  It is like something tuning up before the Music begins....  The metaphor altogether ran away with Sir Richmond’s half dreaming mind.  Some day perhaps all life would go to music.

Love was music and power.  If he had loved enough he need never have drifted away from his wife.  Love would have created love, would have tolerated and taught and inspired.  Where there is perfect love there is neither greed nor impatience.  He would have done his work calmly.  He would have won his way with his Committee instead of fighting and quarrelling with it perpetually....

“Flimsy creatures,” he whispered.  “Uncertain health.  Uncertain strength.  A will that comes and goes.  Moods of baseness.  Moods of utter beastliness....  Love like April sunshine.  April?...”

He dozed and dreamt for a time of spring passing into a high summer sunshine, into a continuing music, of love.  He thought of a world like some great playhouse in which players and orchestra and audience all co-operate in a noble production without dissent or conflict.  He thought he was the savage of thirty thousand years ago dreaming of the great world that is still perhaps thirty thousand years ahead.  His effort to see more of that coming world than indistinct and cloudy pinnacles and to hear more than a vague music, dissolved his dream and left him awake again and wrestling with the problem of Miss Grammont.

Section 2

The shadow of Martin stood over him, inexorable.  He had to release Miss Grammont from the adventure into which he had drawn her.  This decision stood out stern-and inevitable in his mind with no conceivable alternative.

As he looked at the task before him he began to realize its difficulty.  He was profoundly in love with her, he was still only learning how deeply, and she was not going to play a merely passive part in this affair.  She was perhaps as deeply in love with him....

He could not bring himself to the idea of confessions and disavowals.  He could not bear to think of her disillusionment.  He felt that he owed it to her not to disillusion her, to spoil things for her in that fashion.  “To turn into something mean and ugly after she has believed in me....  It would be like playing a practical joke upon her.  It would be like taking her into my arms and suddenly making a grimace at her....  It would scar her with a second humiliation....”