The climax had come. He was determined that things should not continue as they were. If Miss Brooke simply regarded their connection as a mere students' companionship, agreeable to both parties but strictly temporary, then he must end it immediately. Miss Brooke must at once be made aware of what this friendship meant to him. What he had so far deemed inexpedient seemed to him the only expediency--to stake all on one coup. In the stress of the crisis the prejudices that were his by inheritance and teaching, and that his new life had caused to slumber, asserted themselves again, crying aloud against these friendships. Miss Brooke ought never to have expected him to be proof against that sort of thing, of which he had never had experience. Pemberton might be able and content to flutter round without hurt, but he himself had been a lost man from the beginning. It soothed him to map out the future as he wished it to be, and all seemed so natural and reasonable that, if she cared for him in the least, she could not but admit his views on every point. He felt himself filled with an infinite longing, an infinite tenderness. He would surround her with his love so that escape from it should be impossible. It should permeate every fibre of her being, and she should in the end come to him and give up everything to fulfil the duties of a wife, presiding over his household, absorbing herself in his career, and giving all her thought to the unity their two lives would constitute. Of course, she could paint in such time as was left to her, and any glory she might achieve would redound to the credit of his name. Still when a woman had once become a wife, he argued, her ambition generally faded. Wifehood was absorbing. Greater glory than that of being a perfect wife there could not be. A few days later, when his emotion had somewhat calmed down, and he could trust himself sufficiently to see her, he called at the _pension_, but, as had happened occasionally from the beginning, he did not find her at home. So the next morning he sent her a great heterogeneous mass of flowers with the half-jesting, half-reproachful hope they might meet with better fortune than he. Whereupon he immediately received a letter explaining she had passed the previous evening with some very nice people in the Avenue Kleber, and announcing her intention of taking him there on the morrow. Would he dine early and call for her? She thanked him for the flowers in a postscript, saying they had transformed her room into a veritable bower.