I too have felt the load I bore

In a too strong emotion’s sway;

I too have wished, no woman more,

This starting, feverish heart, away.

I too have longed for trenchant force

And will like a dividing spear;

Have praised the keen, unscrupulous course,

Which knows no doubt, which feels no fear.

But in the world I learnt, what there

Thou too will surely one day prove,

That will, that energy, though rare,

And yet far, far less rare than love.

—Matthew Arnold, “A Farewell” (1853)

Charles’s thoughts on his own eventual way back to Lyme were all variations on that agelessly popular male theme: “You’ve been playing with fire, my boy.” But it was precisely that theme, by which I mean that the tenor of his thoughts matched the verbal tenor of the statement. He had been very foolish, but his folly had not been visited on him. He had run an absurd risk; and escaped unscathed. And so now, as the great stone claw of the Cobb came into sight far below, he felt exhilarated.

And how should he have blamed himself very deeply? From the outset his motives had been the purest; he had cured her of her madness; and if something impure had for a moment threatened to infiltrate his defenses, it had been but mint sauce to the wholesome lamb. He would be to blame, of course, if he did not now remove himself, and for good, from the fire. That, he would take very good care to do. After all, he was not a moth infatuated by a candle; he was a highly intelligent being, one of the fittest, and endowed with total free will. If he had not been sure of that latter safeguard, would he ever have risked himself in such dangerous waters? I am mixing metaphors—but that was how Charles’s mind worked.

And so, leaning on free will quite as much as on his ashplant, he descended the hill to the town. All sympathetic physical feelings towards the girl he would henceforth rigorously suppress, by free will. Any further solicitation of a private meeting he would adamantly discountenance, by free will. All administration of his interest should be passed to Aunt Tranter, by free will. And he was therefore permitted, obliged rather, to continue to keep Ernestina in the dark, by the same free will. By the time he came in sight of the White Lion, he had free-willed himself most convincingly into a state of self-congratulation ... and one in which he could look at Sarah as an object of his past.

A remarkable young woman, a remarkable young woman. And baffling. He decided that that was—had been, rather— her attraction: her unpredictability. He did not realize that she had two qualities as typical of the English as his own admix-ture of irony and convention. I speak of passion and imagina-tion. The first quality Charles perhaps began dimly to per-ceive; the second he did not. He could not, for those two qualities of Sarah’s were banned by the epoch, equated in the first case with sensuality and in the second with the merely fanciful. This dismissive double equation was Charles’s greatest defect—and here he stands truly for his age.

There was still deception in the flesh, or Ernestina, to be faced. But Charles, when he arrived at his hotel, found that family had come to his aid.

A telegram awaited him. It was from his uncle at Win-syatt. His presence was urgently requested “for most important reasons.” I am afraid Charles smiled as soon as he read it; he very nearly kissed the orange envelope. It removed him from any immediate further embarrassment; from the need for further lies of omission. It was most marvelously convenient. He made inquiries ... there was a train early the next morning from Exeter, then the nearest station to Lyme, which meant that he had a good pretext for leaving at once and staying there overnight. He gave orders for the fastest trap in Lyme to be procured. He would drive himself. He felt inclined to make such an urgent rush of it as to let a note to Aunt Tranter’s suffice. But that would have been too coward-ly. So telegram in hand, he walked up the street.

The good lady herself was full of concern, since telegrams for her meant bad news. Ernestina, less superstitious, was plainly vexed. She thought it “too bad” of Uncle Robert to act the grand vizir in this way. She was sure it was nothing; a whim, an old man’s caprice, worse—an envy of young love.

She had, of course, earlier visited Winsyatt, accompanied by her parents; and she had not fallen for Sir Robert. Perhaps it was because she felt herself under inspection; or because the uncle had sufficient generations of squirearchy behind him to possess, by middle-class London standards, really rather bad manners—though a kinder critic might have said agreeably eccentric ones; perhaps because she considered the house such an old barn, so dreadfully old-fashioned in its furnishings and hangings and pictures; because the said uncle so doted on Charles and Charles was so provokingly nephew-ish in return that Ernestina began to feel positively jealous; but above all, because she was frightened.

Neighboring ladies had been summon............