Had he grown to love her whilst standing
on the lawn brightened all over by the evening sun? He had thought
her complexion good: no more. Was it her conversation that had
sown the seed? He had thought her words ingenious, and very
creditable to a young woman, but not noteworthy. Had the chess-
playing anything to do with it? Certainly not: he had thought her
at that time a rather conceited child.
Knight's experience was a complete disproof of the assumption that
love always comes by glances of the eye and sympathetic touches of
the fingers: that, like flame, it makes itself palpable at the
moment of generation. Not till they were parted, and she had
become sublimated in his memory, could he be said to have even
attentively regarded her.
Thus, having passively gathered up images of her which his mind
did not act upon till the cause of them was no longer before him,
he appeared to himself to have fallen in love with her soul, which
had temporarily assumed its disembodiment to accompany him on his
way.
She began to rule him so imperiously now that, accustomed to
analysis, he almost trembled at the possible result of the
introduction of this new force among the nicely adjusted ones of
his ordinary life. He became restless: then he forgot all
collateral subjects in the pleasure of thinking about her.
Yet it must be said that Knight loved philosophically rather than
with romance.
He thought of her manner towards him.
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