Colin had suffered a defeat. He knew it, and he understood why, and learned a larger wisdom from it. He had been altogether too abrupt: excited and possessed himself, he had expected Violet to leap at once, in surrender and panic, over that huge gulf that separated them, when he asked her to come to the chapel with him. He should have known better, he told himself: it was demanding the impossible. The effect had been that, in her vital recoil, she had accomplished a supreme feat in the completion of her self-abandonment to the power of Love. She had made no reservation; she had cast herself on the spread arms of its sustaining force. It was quite consistent, too, that, the moment afterwards, when he had told her that, if she refused to come, he would take Dennis with him, she had said she would come. Love still upheld her and chose for her, and its force, he knew, had drained him of his, so that he no longer cared at that moment whether she came or not, or whether it was worth while even to fetch Dennis.... He could have done that, but it would have been a mere repetition of his original mistake. Dennis would no more leap to the sacrament of evil than Violet. The worship of evil demanded a dedication of the soul.... Dennis must be wooed like some shy maiden.... His boyish heart was affianced to his mother, and its clinging tentacles, vigorous as young shoots of ivy, must be ever so gently detached, so that the boy would scarcely know that any detachment was going on, and laid, full of the sap of spring, round his father’s encircling arm. Until that was done, Dennis would turn but a puzzled and incurious ear to anything of ultimate significance. Colin must abound in wholesome school-boy topics and interests, until the ivy clung close to him, and leaned on him for the support of its growth. Then, but not till then, could the education and enlistment of his instincts begin. It would be rather a bore, Colin thought: he would have to play golf with him, and go out to shoot the silly pigeons, and take him up to London perhaps to see the public-schools competition in racquets. Dennis evidently adored one of the boys who was playing for Eton, his senior by some four years. Colin wondered what sort of a fellow he was....