He went on to imagine the impossible. So far, indeed, did he go in
this futile direction that, as others are wont to do, he constructed
dialogues and scenes in which Grace had turned out to be the mistress
of Hintock Manor-house, the mysterious Mrs. Charmond, particularly
ready and willing to be wooed by himself and nobody else. "Well, she
isn't that," he said, finally. "But she's a very sweet, nice,
exceptional girl."
The next morning he breakfasted alone, as usual. It was snowing with a
fine-flaked desultoriness just sufficient to make the woodland gray,
without ever achieving whiteness. There was not a single letter for
Fitzpiers, only a medical circular and a weekly newspaper.
To sit before a large fire on such mornings, and read, and gradually
acquire energy till the evening came, and then, with lamp alight, and
feeling full of vigor, to pursue some engrossing subject or other till
the small hours, had hitherto been his practice. But to-day he could
not settle into his chair. That self-contained position he had lately
occupied, in which the only attention demanded was the concentration of
the inner eye, all outer regard being quite gratuitous, seemed to have
been taken by insidious stratagem, and for the first time he had an
interest outside the house. He walked from one window to another, and
became aware that the most irksome of solitudes is not the solitude of
remoteness, but that which is just outside desirable company.
The breakfast hour went by heavily enough, and the next followed, in
the same half-snowy, half-rainy style, the weather now being the
inevitable relapse which sooner or later succeeds a time too radiant
for the season, such as they had enjoyed in the late midwinter at
Hintock. To people at home there these changeful tricks had their
interests; the strange mistakes that some of the more sanguine trees
had made in budding before their month, to be incontinently glued up by
frozen thawings now; the similar sanguine errors of impulsive birds in
framing nests that were now swamped by snow-water, and other such
incidents, prevented any sense of wearisomeness in the minds of the
natives. But these were features of a world not familiar to Fitzpiers,
and the inner visions to which he had almost exclusively attended
having suddenly failed in their power to absorb him, he felt
unutterably dreary.
He wondered how long Miss Melbury was going to stay in Hintock. The
season was unpropitious for accidental encounters with her
out-of-doors, and except by accident he saw not how they were to become
acquainted. One thing was clear--any acquaintance with her could only,
with a due regard to his future, be casual, at most of the nature of a
flirtation; for he had high aims, and they would some day lead him into
other spheres than this.