‘Oh yes,’ the girl replied, as she came forward, and made a sudden offer of her hand.

She too had been present the other day at Whitelaw.  Her ‘Oh yes’ sounded offensive to Godwin, yet in shaking hands with her he felt a warm pressure, and it flattered him when he became aware that Marcella regarded him from time to time with furtive interest.  Presently he learnt that Christian and his sister were on a short visit at the house of their relatives; their home was in London.  Marcella had seated herself stiffly by a window, and seemed to pay more attention to the view without than to the talk which went on, until dinner was announced.

Speculating on all he saw, Godwin noticed that Christian Moxey showed a marked preference for the youngest of his cousins, a girl of eighteen, whose plain features were frequently brightened with a happy and very pleasant smile.  When he addressed her (by the name of Janet) his voice had a playful kindness which must have been significant to everyone who heard it.  At dinner, his place was by her side, and he attended to her with more than courtesy.  This astonished Peak.  He deemed it incredible that any man should conceive a tender feeling for a girl so far from beautiful.  Constantly occupied with thought of sexual attachments, he had never imagined anything of the kind apart from loveliness of feature in the chosen object; his instincts were, in fact, revolted by the idea of love for such a person as Janet Moxey.  Christian seemed to be degraded by such a suggestion.  In his endeavour to solve the mystery, Godwin grew half unconscious of the other people about him.

Such play of the imaginative and speculative faculties accounts for the common awkwardness of intelligent young men in society that is strange to them.  Only the cultivation of a double consciousness puts them finally at ease.  Impossible to converse with suavity, and to heed the forms of ordinary good-breeding, when the brain is absorbed in all manner of new problems:  one must learn to act a part, to control the facial mechanism, to observe and anticipate, even whilst the intellect is spending its sincere energy on subjects unavowed.  The perfectly graceful man will always be he who has no strong apprehension either of his own personality or of that of others, who lives on the surface of things, who can be interested without emotion, and surprised without contemplative impulse.  Never yet had Godwin Peak uttered a word that was worth listening to, or made a remark that declared his mental powers, save in most familiar colloquy.  He was beginning to understand the various reasons of his seeming clownishness, but this very process of self-study opposed an obstacle to improvement.