He had a shadow, not more than a shadow of excuse for his preposterous misunderstanding of her ease. Sam followed the crowd, accepted readymade their principles and their lack of principles, their morality and their immorality, and to the crowd he followed the theory was faithfulness and the practice as much licence as they could take without being found out. They made a boast rather than a secret of their affairs with a shopgirl or a typist, he had never had an affair and was flattered to think that he was to have one now. He thought that an affair was rather a manly thing to have. When Effie spoke, he had a great surprise, then cheapened her insultingly. He decided that he had been wrong about her. After all, she was nothing more than a pretty typist with whom he was going to have his first affair, who was going to give him the opportunity to join in that sly boasting in hotel smoke-rooms which was the habit of his crowd. He, too, would rank amongst the sportsmen. But, even at his worst, he had the grace to doubt that this was of the same kind as those other affairs. It had a lowest common measure with them, but--Effie! Cheapen her as he would, he could not think of her as cheap enough for that. When others did this thing it was, surely, that they were giving rein to grossness: it was at least charitable to assume that the women of their amours were of coarser grain than their wives, and Effie’s was not the coarser grain. He drifted, acquiescing and puzzled, through the fog of his perplexity. Illumination came to him, not in the crowded railway carriage, but in the trap which drove them from the station to the Inn. It came, he thought, miraculously, but perhaps the miracle was nothing more than that a man sees clearly in Westmoreland, and sees through dirt in Manchester. He worshipped Effie who was sacrificing all to him, and with abasement at the thought that he had meant, with his pitiful achievements, to surprise her. He, shepherded to joy at the Marbeck Inn had set out to surprise Effie! That was what made it, from the first dawn of understanding, a perfect wonder-tale. He had not calculated this; it happened, like a dream, in the air, unrooted in prevision. But that was all it had, except its rapt intensity, of the quality of dream. It was dreamlike because it was more vivid than his experience of life, but it was life. Only, he had not known these things about life before. He had underestimated life. The Inn lay in a saucer of the hills at the end of a road which led to nowhere. As a road, it finished at the Inn and went on only as a rough cart-track which dwindled and divided into two trails across the passes. The fells came down in grandeur to the Inn--it wasn’t a place from which one looked at distant hills, but one where the hills were intimately there--and half a mile away there was the Lake.