called being in love with HER! He did not think much about her
money, but had she then been brought to poverty, he would at least
have hesitated about marrying her.

In the family he was regarded as her affianced, although she did not
treat him as such, but merely went on bewitching him, pleased that
at least he was a man of the world.

While one is yet only IN LOVE, the real person, the love-capable,
lies covered with the rose-leaves of a thousand sleepy-eyed dreams,
and through them come to the dreamer but the barest hints of the
real person of whom is the dream. A thousand fancies fly out,
approach, and cross, but never meet; the man and the woman are
pleased, not with each other, but each with the fancied other. The
merest common likings are taken for signs of a wonderful sympathy,
of a radical unity--of essential capacity, therefore, of loving and
being loved; at a hundred points their souls seem to touch, but
their contacts are the merest brushings as of insect-antennae; the
real man, the real woman, is all the time asleep under the
rose-leaves. Happy is the rare fate of the true--to wake and come
forth and meet in the majesty of the truth, in the image of God, in
their very being, in the power of that love which alone is being.
They love, not this and that about each other, but each the very
other--a love as essential to reality, to truth, to religion, as the
love of the very God. Where such love is, let the differences of
taste, the unfitnesses of temperament be what they may, the two must
by and by be thoroughly one.

Sercombe saw no reason why a gentleman should not amuse himself with
any young woman he pleased. What was the chief to him! He was not