"If Maud has any character whatever," he sometimes said, "if she shows the least sign of seeing him except as he shows himself to her, if she has any interest in life beyond his lectures, he will feel she is not suited to him, and he will give his bridle-reins--I mean his waterproof spats--a shake, and adieu for evermore." Barrett eventually lured Maitland into deep water, long past the bathing machine of adieu forevermore, as he called it. When he was too cock-o-hoop, we reminded him that, after all, he was only one of a committee, and that he had been immensely helped by the young woman herself. She really looked such a saint, and as innocent as a pigeon's egg. But Barrett stuck to it that her appearance ought, on the contrary, to have warned Maitland off, and that he was an infernal ass to think such an exquisite creature as that would give a second thought to a stout old bachelor of forty-five, looking exactly like a cod that had lain too long on the slab. I could not see that Maitland was so very like a cod, but there was a vindictiveness about Barrett's description of him that I really think must have been caused by his romantic admiration of Parker's aunt, and his disgust at the slight that he felt had been put upon her. She married again the following year Barrett's elder brother's Colonel. Barrett hustled Maitland about till he got almost thin. He snap-shotted him waiting for his Maud at Charing Cross station. And he did not make her write half as often as you would think. But he somehow egged Maitland on until, by the middle of the vacation, he had worked him up into such a state that Barrett had to send Maud into a rest cure for her health, so as to get a little rest himself. When we met at Cambridge in October he had collected such a lot of material, such priceless letters, and several good photographs of Maitland's back, that he said he thought we were almost in a position to discover to him exactly how he stood. He threw down his last letter, and as Parker and I read them, any lurking pity we felt for him as having fallen into Barrett's clutches, evaporated. They showed Maitland at his worst. It was obvious that he was tepidly in love with Maud, or rather that he was anxious she should be in love with him. He said voluntarily all the things that torture ought not to have been able to wring out of him. He told her the story of the woman who had quarrelled with him because he did not dance attendance on her, and several other incidents which meant, if they meant anything, that there was something in his personality, hidden from his own searching self-examination, which was deadly to the peace of mind of the opposite sex. He was very humble about it. He did not understand it, but there it was. He said that he had from boyhood lived an austere, intellectual life, which he humbly hoped had not been without effect on the tone of the college, that he had never met so far any one whom he could love.