“Why can't she care? I suppose I'm nothing much, but she's known me all her life, and she used to like me. There's something—I can't make out. Could you do anything for me with her?” Lennan pointed across the street. “In every other one of those houses, Oliver,” he said, “there's probably some creature who can't make out why another creature doesn't care. Passion comes when it will, goes when it will; and we poor devils have no say in it.” “What do you advise me, then?” Lennan had an almost overwhelming impulse to turn on his heel and leave the young man standing there. But he forced himself to look at his face, which even then had its attraction—perhaps more so than ever, so pallid and desperate it was. And he said slowly, staring mentally at every word: “I'm not up to giving you advice. The only thing I might say is: One does not press oneself where one isn't wanted; all the same—who knows? So long as she feels you're there, waiting, she might turn to you at any moment. The more chivalrous you are, Oliver, the more patiently you wait, the better chance you have.” Oliver took those words of little comfort without flinching. “I see,” he said. “Thanks! But, my God! it's hard. I never could wait.” And with that epigram on himself, holding out his hand, he turned away. Lennan went slowly home, trying to gauge exactly how anyone who knew all would judge him. It was a little difficult in this affair to keep a shred of dignity. Sylvia had not gone up, and he saw her looking at him anxiously. The one strange comfort in all this was that his feeling for her, at any rate, had not changed. It seemed even to have deepened—to be more real to him. How could he help staying awake that night? How could he help thinking, then? And long time he lay, staring at the dark. As if thinking were any good for fever in the veins! X Passion never plays the game. It, at all events, is free from self-consciousness, and pride; from dignity, nerves, scruples, cant, moralities; from hypocrisies, and wisdom, and fears for pocket, and position in this world and the next. Well did the old painters limn it as an arrow or a wind! If it had not been as swift and darting, Earth must long ago have drifted through space untenanted—to let....