On paper, the contest should be of the most one-sided description; for the defending force (as represented by the lady) is at liberty to choose its own ground and precipitate or ward off an assault as it pleases, while the invader has to manoeuvre clumsily and self-consciously in the open, exposed to shafts of ridicule, fiery days of humiliation, and frosty nights of indifference. He marches and countermarches, feeling sometimes tender, sometimes fierce, not seldom ridiculous; but never, never, never sure of his ground. Truly it is a one-sided business--on paper. But woman has no regard for paper. Under the operation of a mysterious but merciful law of nature, it is her habit, having placed herself in an absolutely impregnable position, to abandon her defences without warning or explanation--not infrequently, at the moment when the dispirited lover at her gates is upon the point of striking camp and beating a melancholy retreat, marching out, bag and baggage, into the arms of her dazed and incredulous opponent. But Philip, being unversed in the feminine instinct of self-defence, did not know this. To him, from a distance, Love had appeared as a Palace Beautiful standing on the summit of a hill--a fairy fabric of gleaming minarets, slender lines, and soft curves--a haven greatly to be desired by a lonely pilgrim. Now that he had scaled the height and reached his destination he found nothing but frowning battlements and blank walls. In other words, he had overlooked the difference between arrival and admission. To sum up the situation in the language which would undoubtedly have been employed by that master of terse phraseology, Mr. Timothy Rendle, Philip was "up against it." There is nothing quite so impregnable as the reserve of a nice-minded girl. The coquette and the sentimental miss are easy game: there is never any doubt as to what they expect of a man; and man, being man, sees to it that they are not disappointed. But to make successful love to a girl who is neither of these things calls for some powers of intuition and a thick skin. It is the latter priceless qualification which usually pulls a man through. Philip possessed rather less than the average male equipment of intuition, and his skin was deplorably thin. Peggy meant so much to him that he shrank from putting everything to the touch at once. Like all those who have put all their eggs in one basket, he feared his fate too much. So he temporised: he hung back, and waited. If Peggy had ever given him an opening he would have set his teeth and plunged into it, blindly and ponderously; but she never did. She was always kind, always cheerful, always the best of companions; but she kept steadily to the surface of things and appeared to be entirely oblivious of the existence of the suppressed volcano which sighed and rumbled beneath her feet.