Dahlia replied with letter upon letter; blindly impassioned, and again singularly cold; but with no reproaches.  She was studying, she said.  Her head ached a little; only a little.  She walked; she read poetry; she begged him to pardon her for not drinking wine.  She was glad that he burnt her letters, which were so foolish that if she could have the courage to look at them after they were written, they would never be sent.  He was slightly revolted by one exclamation:  “How ambitious you are!”

“Because I cannot sit down for life in a London lodging-house!” he thought, and eyed her distantly as a poor good creature who had already accepted her distinctive residence in another sphere than his.  From such a perception of her humanity, it was natural that his livelier sense of it should diminish.  He felt that he had awakened; and he shook her off.

And now he set to work to subdue Mrs. Lovell.  His own subjugation was the first fruit of his effort.  It was quite unacknowledged by him:  but when two are at this game, the question arises—­“Which can live without the other?” and horrid pangs smote him to hear her telling musically of the places she was journeying to, the men she would see, and the chances of their meeting again before he was married to the heiress Adeline.

“I have yet to learn that I am engaged to her,” he said.  Mrs. Lovell gave him a fixed look,—­

“She has a half-brother.”

He stepped away in a fury.

“Devil!” he muttered, absolutely muttered it, knowing that he fooled and frowned like a stage-hero in stagey heroics.  “You think to hound me into this brutal stupidity of fighting, do you?  Upon my honour,” he added in his natural manner, “I believe she does, though!”

But the look became his companion.  It touched and called up great vanity in his breast, and not till then could he placably confront the look.  He tried a course of reading.  Every morning he was down in the library, looking old in an arm-chair over his book; an intent abstracted figure.

Mrs. Lovell would enter and eye him carelessly; utter little commonplaces and go forth.  The silly words struck on his brain.  The book seemed hollow; sounded hollow as he shut it.  This woman breathed of active striving life.  She was a spur to black energies; a plumed glory; impulsive to chivalry.  Everything she said and did held men in scales, and approved or rejected them.

Intoxication followed this new conception of her.  He lost altogether his right judgement; even the cooler after-thoughts were lost.  What sort of man had Harry been, her first husband?  A dashing soldier, a quarrelsome duellist, a dull dog.  But, dull to her?  She, at least, was reverential to the memory of him.

She lisped now and then of “my husband,” very prettily, and with intense provocation; and yet she worshipped brains.  Evidently she thirsted for that rare union of brains and bravery in a man, and would never surrender till she had discovered it.  Perhaps she fancied it did not exist.  It might be that she took Edward as the type of brains, and Harry of bravery, and supposed that the two qualities were not to be had actually in conjunction.