Clara Hopgood

Baruch was now in love. He had fallen in love with Clara suddenly

and totally. His tendency to reflectiveness did not diminish his

passion: it rather augmented it. The men and women whose thoughts

are here and there continually are not the people to feel the full

force of love. Those who do feel it are those who are accustomed to

think of one thing at a time, and to think upon it for a long time.

'No man,' said Baruch once, 'can love a woman unless he loves God.'

'I should say,' smilingly replied the Gentile, 'that no man can love

God unless he loves a woman.' 'I am right,' said Baruch, 'and so are

you.' But Baruch looked in the glass: his hair, jet black when he was a

youth, was marked with grey, and once more the thought came to him--

this time with peculiar force--that he could not now expect a woman

to love him as she had a right to demand that he should love, and

that he must be silent. He was obliged to call upon Barnes in about

a fortnight's time. He still read Hebrew, and he had seen in the

shop a copy of the Hebrew translation of the Moreh Nevochim of

Maimonides, which he greatly coveted, but could not afford to buy.

Like every true book-lover, he could not make up his mind when he

wished for a book which was beyond his means that he ought once for

all to renounce it, and he was guilty of subterfuges quite unworthy

of such a reasonable creature in order to delude himself into the

belief that he might yield. For example, he wanted a new overcoat

badly, but determined it was more prudent to wait, and a week

afterwards very nearly came to the conclusion that as he had not

ordered the coat he had actually accumulated a fund from which the

Moreh Nevochim might be purchased. When he came to the shop he saw

Barnes was there, and he persuaded himself he should have a quieter

moment or two with the precious volume when Clara was alone. Barnes,

of course, gossiped with everybody.

He therefore called again in the evening, about half an hour before

closing time, and found that Barnes had gone home. Clara was busy

with a catalogue, the proof of which she was particularly anxious to

send to the printer that night. He did not disturb her, but took

down the Maimonides, and for a few moments was lost in revolving the

doctrine, afterwards repeated and proved by a greater than

Maimonides, that the will and power of God are co-extensive: that

there is nothing which might be and is not. It was familiar to

Baruch, but like all ideas of that quality and magnitude--and there

are not many of them--it was always new and affected him like a

starry night, seen hundreds of times, yet for ever infinite and

original.