The Woodlanders

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.