Often it happens that the staid and decorous, hard as iron in their disapproval of all frivolity, are suddenly and completely melted by someone frivolous beyond their uttermost possibilities of disapproval. One is liable to love one’s opposites, if those opposites be sufficiently opposed. Only a little less different herself, and Gundred might have disliked Kingston Darnley; but he was so madly divergent from all her ideals that the very sharpness of the contrast drove her to capitulate rapidly and completely. She even ceased to claim his attention; she began to beg for it. Her training had collaborated with her nature in guarding her from self-betrayal. Her manners continued gentle, guarded, suavely frigid as before. But Lady Adela, with the eye of a hopeful mother, pierced the disguise of Gundred’s feelings, and lost no time in proclaiming the discovery to her son. Kingston Darnley, for his part, was strongly attracted by Gundred. To his fastidious temperament she never offered a jarring note. She was always crisp and cool; always deliberate and graceful; her hair was never disordered, nor her hat crooked, nor her stockings ill-gartered. At all points she was unalterably serene, impeccable and satisfying. Emotionally, too, she gave him what he wanted. He needed no ardent, unbalanced temper in his wife. He needed just that gracious acquiescence which Miss Mortimer supplied. She was restful in all her ways, her mind was thoroughly well-mannered, and her smiling calm assured him of a sympathetic nature. As he laid his ideas before her he was enraptured to see how sweetly, how reasonably she listened, and found full agreement in her cool grey-blue eyes, behind which, in reality, her inattentive brain was admiring the tact of his tie. But, whatever her secret thoughts, she never revealed them, and those cool, grey-blue eyes had been trained to express decorous attention; therefore Kingston Darnley soon realized that in Miss Mortimer he had found that perfect conjunction of ideal soul with ideal body in the quest for which his five-and-twenty years had hitherto been vainly spent. That his feeling was not a great passion he sometimes felt--that it was not even commensurate with the passion which he had sometimes found himself forced half-incredulously to divine behind the chill fires of Gundred’s eyes. But his experience with the lady of the downy nose had daunted him and disillusioned him; with the knowledge of wide experience he now knew that a great passion falls to the lot of very few, and that it is well to take the good the gods provide. Failing the Supramundane Mate to whom all idealists look with longing, he would compromise with a woman in every respect charming, alluring, delightful--a woman of temperate mood, a woman of neat and faultless style in body and mind, a woman, in short, who could be trusted never to clash with any of life’s harmonies or discords.