She realized his want of sympathy and humanity, his elaborate attitude of standing aside from the problems of life in favour of a closer contemplation of those of Nature. It was Nature he loved, and Nature only, with his full heart. The human interest was a purely secondary consideration with him. Not “in many mortal forms” did he seek “the shadow of that idol.” He was Alastor and she was the Lady. She must remember that. Alastor could doubtless have done quite well without the Lady. She represented the ever-restless Spirit of Humanity which Alastor had come into the wilderness to avoid. And, for his sake, for the sake of her valued privileges, she must learn to keep it in abeyance and suppress it as far as she could. She must love Nature too. It was difficult, for though, in her quality of romanticist, she had always talked a good deal about it. Nature, to her, was merely a background for people, just as flowers were an adornment for her bodice or her parlour. But the very conditions of her tenure here demanded that she should accommodate herself to the mood of her companion. Since, by happy chance, she was admitted to be an inmate with him of the terrestrial Paradise of which he was the tutelary God, she must contrive, as animals do, to adapt herself to her new habitat. She thought of herself as a tremulous, storm-tossed soul, newly entered into bliss, and afraid to compromise her precarious happiness by any assumption of right or too marked a signalizing of her presence there. With this end in view, she began to cultivate a capacity for silence, an art of self-effacement, a spirit-like vagueness of outline. Her wish was to dissimulate her personality as far as was possible, and merely to form, as it were, part of the silent, unobtrusive world of Nature that he loved. It was a stiff novitiate to a complete education. Her plan was successful, on the whole. The painter began to take her as a matter of course, to treat her as if she had always been there, as a busy man might treat a sister, or a college companion, without ceremony, but with much protective kindness and camaraderie. She was sure that the notion of her being in any way compromised by her stay with him in this lonely inn never so much as entered his mind. It was not that he was ignorant of conventions; he was simply too preoccupied to think of them. But, indeed, the new brightness of her eyes, bred of her happiness, the lovely, natural colour in her cheeks, the conscious curve of her red lips, inevitably suggested the world’s cry for a chaperon. She had been an interesting woman when she came to Rokeby; she was now almost a beautiful one. The little hollows in her cheeks had filled up; her figure had improved; she was like a blue serge wood nymph darting about the broken pathways and shelving banks of this embowered painter’s paradise.