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 could be put up overnight to serve till the next tide swept in, and no great harm done.

Being in love was analogous to having malaria, Each recurrence would be somewhat less virulent; but each recurrence would leave you weaker than the last. Up to the time of Olga's advent, he had recovered from each attack with fair rapidity. As soon as the first symptom had appeared he had been in the habit of dosing heavily with logical formulae bequeathed to a weak-minded posterity by the Professor Thanet, and usually he had been through with the disease before it had been through with him. There was a question in his mind, however, as to whether it was worse to suffer from the disease than from the excessive preventions,—too much logic could be paralyzing. His friends and critics averred that he didn't fling himself into life hard enough, that he hadn't learned to lose his soul in order to find it. Well, this time they couldn't cavil. This time his preventions were having no curative effect whatever. The fever was raging as never before. The more he told himself that Olga was an ordinary little nobody, the more he saw her swathed in a magic cloak.

His efforts to paint were more sporadic than ever. To stand before his easel and wrestle with an angel who was positively devilish was a futile attitude, and he resorted to books. Long since released from academic trammels he was creeping back mentally into kennels that had once promised but austere hospitality.