In her very dawn of girlhood she had been in love with Godfrey: had blushed at his coming: had quarrelled with him, and wept stormy tears: had suffered all those alternations of joy and grief, pride and self-abasement, which accompany love in an impassioned nature. Theodore remembered her treatment of the fifth-form Etonian, of the undergraduate, remembered the passionate drama perpetually being acted in those two young lives, a drama which he had watched with aching heart; and he felt that he could never be as that first lover had been. He was associated with the commonplace of her life. She had laughed often at his dry-as-dust talk with her father—the dull discussions about leases and bills of dilapidation. A solicitor living from year’s end to year’s end in a country town—what a dreary person he must needs appear beside the brilliant young Patrician, full of the gladness of the life that knows neither labour nor care. He sickened at the thought of that contrast. He had served his father faithfully hitherto, and the bond between father and son had been one of strong affection as well as duty; but for the last year there had been growing upon him an inexpressible weariness of the house in which he was born, and the city in which he had lived the chief part of his uneventful life. He had struggled against the disgust of familiar things, telling himself that it was an unworthy feeling, and that he would be a snob if he indulged it. Yet the disgust grew into absolute loathing; the monotonous days, the repetitive work, oppressed him like a nightmare. Since Juanita’s marriage the burden had become more and more intolerable. To be so near her, yet so far. To be letting life creep away in dull drudgery which could never bring him nearer her social level; to feel that all his pursuits and associations were beneath the woman he loved, and could never arouse the faintest interest in her mind. This was almost too bitter to be borne, and he had for some time past been meditating some way of escape, some manner of release from these old fetters into the wider arena of the outer world.