The Woodlanders

Instead of resuming his investigation of South's brain, which perhaps

was not so interesting under the microscope as might have been expected

from the importance of that organ in life, Fitzpiers reclined and

ruminated on the interview. Grace's curious susceptibility to his

presence, though it was as if the currents of her life were disturbed

rather than attracted by him, added a special interest to her general

charm. Fitzpiers was in a distinct degree scientific, being ready and

zealous to interrogate all physical manifestations, but primarily he

was an idealist. He believed that behind the imperfect lay the

perfect; that rare things were to be discovered amid a bulk of

commonplace; that results in a new and untried case might be different

from those in other cases where the conditions had been precisely

similar. Regarding his own personality as one of unbounded

possibilities, because it was his own--notwithstanding that the factors

of his life had worked out a sorry product for thousands--he saw

nothing but what was regular in his discovery at Hintock of an

altogether exceptional being of the other sex, who for nobody else

would have had any existence.

One habit of Fitzpiers's--commoner in dreamers of more advanced age

than in men of his years--was that of talking to himself. He paced

round his room with a selective tread upon the more prominent blooms of

the carpet, and murmured, "This phenomenal girl will be the light of my

life while I am at Hintock; and the special beauty of the situation is

that our attitude and relations to each other will be purely spiritual.

Socially we can never be intimate. Anything like matrimonial

intentions towards her, charming as she is, would be absurd. They

would spoil the ethereal character of my regard. And, indeed, I have

other aims on the practical side of my life."

Fitzpiers bestowed a regulation thought on the advantageous marriage he

was bound to make with a woman of family as good as his own, and of

purse much longer. But as an object of contemplation for the present,

as objective spirit rather than corporeal presence, Grace Melbury would

serve to keep his soul alive, and to relieve the monotony of his days.

His first notion--acquired from the mere sight of her without

converse--that of an idle and vulgar flirtation with a

timber-merchant's pretty daughter, grated painfully upon him now that

he had found what Grace intrinsically was. Personal intercourse with

such as she could take no lower form than intellectual communion, and

mutual explorations of the world of thought. Since he could not call

at her father's, having no practical views, cursory encounters in the

lane, in the wood, coming and going to and from church, or in passing

her dwelling, were what the acquaintance would have to feed on.