In this profound girlish soul of hers, which was her very self, while the other was more or less the product of circumstances, it still occurred to Rosalind now and then to wonder how it was that she had never had a lover. Even this was meant in a manner of her own. Miss Trevanion of Highcourt had not been without suitors; men who had admired her beauty or her position. But these were not at all what she meant by a lover. She meant what an imaginative girl means when such a thought crosses her mind. She meant Romeo, or perhaps Hamlet--had love been restored to the possibilities of that noblest of all disenchanted souls--or even such a symbol as Sir Kenneth. She wondered whether it would ever be hers to find wandering about the world the other part of her, him who would understand every thought and feeling, him to whom it would be needless to speak or to explain, who would know; him for whom mighty love would cleave in twain the burden of a single pain and part it, giving half to him. The world, she thought, could not hold together as it did under the heavens, had it ceased to be possible that men and women should meet each other so. But such a meeting had never occurred yet in Rosalind’s experience, and seeing how common it was, how invariable an occurrence in the experience of all maidens of poetry and fiction, the failure occasioned her always a little surprise. Had she never seen any one, met about the world any form, in which she could embody such a possibility? She did not put this question to herself plainly, but there was in her imagination a sort of involuntary answer to it, or rather the ghost of an answer, which would sometimes make itself known, from without, she thought, more than from within--as if a face had suddenly looked at her, or a whisper been breathed in her ear. She did not give any name to this vision or endeavor to identify it.