part primitive natures, nobly tempered; in our time they tend to extinction.  Growing vulgarism on the one hand, and on the other a development of the psychological conscience, are unfavourable to any relation between the sexes, save those which originate in pure animalism, or in reasoning less or more generous.  Never having experienced any feeling which he could dignify with the name of love, Godwin had no criterion in himself whereby to test the emotions now besetting him.  In a man of his age this was an unusual state of things, for when the ardour which will bear analysis has at length declared itself, it is wont to be moderated by the regretful memory of that fugacious essence which gave to the first frenzy of youth its irrecoverable delight.  He could not say in reply to his impulses:  If that was love which overmastered me, this must be something either more or less exalted.  What he did say was something of this kind:  If desire and tenderness, if frequency of dreaming rapture, if the calmest approval of the mind and the heart’s most exquisite, most painful throbbing, constitute love,—­then assuredly I love Sidwell.  But if to love is to be possessed with madness, to lose all taste of life when hope refuses itself, to meditate frantic follies, to deem it inconceivable that this woman should ever lose her dominion over me, or another reign in her stead,—­then my passion falls short of the true testrum, and I am only dallying with fancies which might spring up as often as I encountered a charming girl.

All things considered, to encourage this amorous preoccupation was probably the height of unwisdom.  The lover is ready at deluding himself, but Peak never lost sight of the extreme unlikelihood that he should ever become Martin Warricombe’s son-in-law, of the thousand respects which forbade his hoping that Sidwell would ever lay her hand in his.  That deep-rooted sense of class which had so much influence on his speculative and practical life asserted itself, with rigid consistency, even against his own aspirations; he attributed to the Warricombes more prejudice on this subject than really existed in them.  He, it was true, belonged to no class whatever, acknowledged no subordination save that of the hierarchy of intelligence; but this could not obscure the fact that his brother sold seeds across a counter, that his sister had married a haberdasher, that his uncle (notoriously) was somewhere or other supplying the public with cheap repasts.  Girls of Sidwell’s delicacy do not misally themselves, for they take into account the fact that such misalliance is fraught with elements of unhappiness, affecting husband as much as wife.  No need to dwell upon the scruples suggested by his moral attitude; he would never be called upon to combat them with reference to Sidwell’s future.

What, then, was he about?  For what advantage was he playing the hypocrite?  Would he, after all, be satisfied with some such wife as the average curate may hope to marry?