“It would interest me much.”

“I had reached the age of seven-and-twenty,” he began, “without having once known even the vague stirrings of the passion of love.  I admired many women, and courted the admiration of them all; but I was as yet not only heart-whole, but, to use your Shakespeare’s phrase, Cupid had not tapped me on the shoulder.

“This detail is not unimportant in my story.  You may possibly have observed that in those passionate natures which reserve their force, and do not fritter away their feelings in scattered flirtations or trivial love-affairs, there is a velocity and momentum, when the movement of passion is once excited, greatly transcending all that is ever felt by expansive and expressive natures.  Slow to be moved, when they do move it is with the whole mass of the heart.  So it was with me.  I purchased my immunity from earlier entanglements by the price of my whole life.  I am not what I was.  Between my past and present self there is a gulf; that gulf is dark, stormy, and profound.  On the far side stands a youth of hope, energy, ambition, and unclouded happiness, with great capacities for loving; on this side a blighted manhood, with no prospects but suffering and storm.”

He paused.  With an effort he seemed to master the suggestions which crowded upon his memory, and continued his narrative in an equable tone.

“I had been for several weeks at Heidelberg.  One of my intimate companions was Kestner, the architect, and he one day proposed to introduce me to his sister-in-law, Ottilie, of whom he had repeatedly spoken to me in terms of great affection and esteem.

“We went, and we were most cordially received.  Ottilie justified Kestner’s praises.  Pretty, but not strikingly so—­clever, but not obtrusively so; her soft dark eyes were frank and winning; her manner was gentle and retiring, with that dash of sentimentalism which seems native to all German girls, but without any of the ridiculous extravagance too often seen in them.  I liked her all the more because I was perfectly at my ease with her, and this was rarely the case in my relations to young women.  I don’t enjoy their society.

“You leap at once to the conclusion that we fell in love.  Your conclusion is precipitate.  Seeing her continually, I grew to admire and respect her; but the significant smiles, winks, and hints of friends, pointing unmistakably at a supposed understanding existing between us, only made me more seriously examine the state of my feelings, and assured me that I was not in love.  It is true that I felt a serene pleasure in her society, and that when away from her she occupied much of my thoughts.  It is true that I often thought of her as a wife; and in these meditations she appeared as one eminently calculated to make a happy home.  But it is no less true that during a temporary absence of hers of a few weeks I felt no sort of uneasiness, no yearning for her presence, no vacancy in my life.  I knew, therefore, that it was not love which I felt.