“I was free to come and go, and say what I pleased, for both families favored the match. She never objected; never said she would not have me; said she liked me as well as any other. In a word she would have married me, if I would have taken her. There are men, I believe, who would make the best of such a consent, saying they were so in love with the woman they would rejoice to take her on any terms: I don’t understand that sort of love! I would as soon think of marrying a woman I hated as a woman that did not love me. I know no reason why any woman should love me, and if no woman can find any, I most go alone. Lufa has found none yet, and life and love too seem to have gone out of me waiting. If you ask me why I do not give it all up, I have no answer. You will say for Lufa, it is only that the right man is not come! It may be so; but I believe there is more than that in it. I fear she is all outside. It is true her poetry is even passionate sometimes; but I suspect all her inspiration comes of the poetry she reads, not of the nature or human nature around her; it comes of ambition, not of love. I don’t know much about verse, but to me there is an air of artificiality about all hers. I can not understand how you could praise her long poem so much--if you were in love with her. She has grown to me like the ghost I told you of. I put out my hand to her, and it goes through her. It makes me feel dead myself to be with her. I wonder sometimes how it would be if suddenly she said she loved me. Should I love her, or should we have changed parts? She is very dainty--very lady-like--but womanly! At one time--and for this I am now punished--the ambition to wake love in her had no small part in my feeling toward her--ambition to be the first and only man so to move her: despair has long cured me of that; but not before I had come to love her in a way I can not now understand. Why I should love her I can not tell; and were it not that I scorn to marry her without love, I should despise my very love. You are thinking, ‘Well then, the way is clear for me!’ It is; I only want to prepare you for what I am confident will follow: you will have the heart taken out of you! That you are poor will be little obstacle if she loves you. She is the heiress, and can do much as she pleases. If she were in love, she would be obstinate. It must be in her somewhere, you will say, else how could she write as she does? But, I say again, look at the multitudes that go to church, and communicate, with whose being religion has no more to do than with that of Satan! I’ve said my say. Good-night!” He rose, and stood. He had not uttered the depth of what he feared concerning Lufa--that she was simply, unobtrusively, unconsciously, absolutely selfish. Walter had listened with a beating heart, now full of hope that he was to be Hildebrand to this Undine, now sick with the conviction that he was destined to fare no better than Sefton.