certain that he would have fallen in love with Beatrice Redwing long before he ever saw Emily, for Beatrice was fair to look upon as few girls are.  He had not done so; he had scarcely—­a strange thing—­been tempted to think of doing so.  That is to say, it needed something more to fire his instincts.  The first five minutes that he spent in Emily’s presence made him more conscious of womanhood than years of constant association with Beatrice.  This love, riveting itself among the intricacies of his being, could not be torn out, and threatened to resist all piecemeal extraction.  Wilfrid regained the command of his mind, and outwardly seemed recovered beyond all danger of relapse; but he did not deceive himself into believing that Emily was henceforth indifferent to him.  He knew that to stand again before her would be to declare again his utter bondage, body and soul.  He loved her still, loved her as his life; he desired her as passionately as ever.  She was not often in his thoughts no more is the consciousness of the processes whereby our being supports itself.  But he had only to let his mind turn to her, and he scoffed at the hope that any other could ever be to him what Emily had been, and was, and would be.

He saw very little of Beatrice, but it came to his ears that her life had undergone a change in several respects, that she spent hours daily in strenuous study of music, and was less seen in the frivolous world.  No hint of the purpose Beatrice secretly entertained ever reached him till, long after, the purpose became action.  He felt that she shunned him, and by degrees he thought he understood her behaviour.  Wilfrid had none of the vulgarest vanity; another man would long ago have suspected that this beautiful girl was in love with him; Wilfrid had remained absolutely without a suspicion of the kind.  He had always taken in good faith her declared aversion for his views; he had believed that her nature and his own were definitely irreconcilable.  This was attributable, first of all to his actual inexperience in life, then to the seriousness with which he held those views which Beatrice vowed detestable.  He, too, was an idealist, and, in many respects, destined to remain so throughout his life; for he would never become, on the one hand, the coldly critical man who dissects motives—­his own and those of others—­to the last fibre, nor yet the superficial cynic who professes, and half-believes, that he can explain the universe by means of a few maxims of cheap pessimism.  So he took, and continued to take, Beatrice’s utterances without any grain of scepticism, and consequently held it for certain that she grew less friendly to him as she grew older.