"Do you mind?" He had risen and was standing over her as she read. "Mind?" "What I've called you?" She looked up suddenly. His face met hers, and before she knew it Aggie's initiation came. "Ah," said Arthur, rising solemn from the consecration of the primal kiss, and drawing himself up like a man for the first time aware of his full stature, "that makes _that_ seem pretty poor stuff, doesn't it?" Young Arthur had just looked upon Love himself, and for that moment his vision was purged of vanity. "Not Browning?" asked Aggie, a little anxiously. "No--Not Browning. Me. Browning could write poetry. I can't. I know that now." And she knew it, too; but that made no difference. It was not for his poetry she loved him. "And so," said her mother, after Arthur had stayed for tea and supper, and said his good-bye and gone--"so that's the man you've been waiting for all this time?" "Yes, that's the man I've been waiting for," said Aggie. Three days later Queningford knew that Aggie was going to marry Arthur Gatty, and that John Hurst was going to marry Susie. Susie was not pretty, but she had eyes like Aggie's. III After all, Susie was married before her eldest sister; for Aggie had to wait till Arthur's salary rose. He thought it was going to rise at midsummer, or if not at midsummer, then at Michaelmas. But midsummer and Michaelmas passed, Christmas and Easter, too, and Arthur's salary showed no sign of rising. He daren't tell Aggie that he had been obliged to leave off reading Latin in the evenings, and was working feverishly at shorthand in order to increase his efficiency. His efficiency increased, but not his salary. Meanwhile he spent all his holidays at Queningford, and Aggie had been twice to town. They saw so little of each other that every meeting was a divine event, a spiritual adventure. If each was not exactly an undiscovered country to the other, there was always some territory left over from last time, endlessly alluring to the pilgrim lover. Whenever Arthur found in Aggie's mind a little bare spot that needed cultivating, he planted there a picture or a poem, that instantly took root, and began to bloom as it had never (to his eyes) bloomed in any other soil. Aggie, for her part, yielded all the treasure of her little kingdom as tribute to the empire that had won her. Many things were uncertain, the rise of Arthur's salary among them; but of one thing they were sure, that they would lead the intellectual life together. Whatever happened, they would keep it up. They were keeping it up as late as August, when Arthur came down for the Bank Holiday. He was still enthusiastic, but uncertainty had dimmed his hope. Marriage had become a magnificent phantasm, superimposed upon a dream, a purely supposititious rise of salary. The prospect had removed itself so far in time that it had parted with its substance, like an object retired modestly into space.