But he was not immensely perturbed at her temporary disappearance; he could find her, if he wanted to. “It’s only a matter of trouble and money, like anything else.” And if she were furious with Valdez, no harm in that! Rather the reverse! Thus he gradually approached his own position, and the questions which he was putting to himself, and had found so difficult that he had been impelled to come and talk them over. These really might be reduced to one, and a very old one, though also often a very big one; it may be variously conceived and described as that between prudence and passion, that between morality and love, that between will and emotion, between the head and the heart. For purposes of the present case it could be personified as being between Nina and Lucinda. As a gentleman, if as nothing more, he had been obliged to own up to his engagement to lunch with Lucinda and to stand by it. But that act settled nothing ultimately. The welcome of a returning Prodigal would await him at Villa San Carlo, though the feast might perhaps be rather too highly peppered with a lofty forgiveness; he was conscious of that feature in the case, but minded it less than I should have; Nina’s pupil was accustomed to her rebukes, and rather hardened against her chastisement. But if arms were open to him elsewhere—soft and seducing arms—what then? Was he to desert Nina? Her and what she stood for? And really, in this situation, she stood for everything that had, up to now, governed his life. She stood (she would not have felt at all inadequate to the demand on her qualities) for prosperity, progress, propriety, and—as a climax—for piety itself. Godfrey had been religiously brought up (the figure of the white-haired Wesleyan Minister at Briarmount rose before my eyes) and was not ashamed to own that the principles thus inculcated had influenced his doings and were still a living force in him. I respected him for the avowal; it is not one that men are very ready to make where a woman is in question; it had been implicit in his reason for knowing nothing of women, given to me a long time ago—that he had not been able to afford to marry. Piety was the highest impersonation which Nina was called upon to undertake. Was it the most powerful, the most compelling? There were so many others, whose images somehow blended into one great and imposing Figure—Regularity, with her cornucopia of worldly advantages, not necessarily lost (Godfrey was quite awake to that) by a secret dallying with her opposite, but thereby rendered insincere—that counted with him—uneasy, and perpetually precarious. He was a long-headed young man; he foresaw every chance against his passion—even the chance that, having first burnt up all he had or hoped for, it would itself become extinct. Then it was not true passion? I don’t know. It was strong enough. Lucinda impersonated too; impersonated things that are very powerful.