Page:The Yellow Book - 05.djvu/32

24 ; but in support of it I rely mainly upon an incident which occurred within a few months of my lamented friend's death, and which formed to the best of my knowledge the sole passage of sentiment in his intensely speculative career.

To say that he fell in love would be to employ a metaphor of quite inappropriate violence. He "shaded off" from a colourless indifference to a certain young woman of his acquaintance through various neutral tints of regard into a sort of pale sunset glow of affection for her. Eleanor Selden was a first cousin of my own. We had seen much of each other from childhood upwards, and I knew—or thought I knew—her well. She was a lively, good-natured, commonplace girl, without a spark of romance about her, and all a woman's eye to the main chance. I don't mean by this that she was more mercenary than most girls. She merely took that practical view of life and its material requirements which has always seemed to me (only I am not a psychologist) to be so much more common among young people of what is supposed to be the sentimental sex, than of the other. I daresay she was not incapable of love—among appropriate surroundings. Unlike some women, she was not constitutionally unfitted to appear with success in the matrimonial drama; but she was particular about the mise-en-scène. "Act I., A Cottage" would not have suited her at all. She would have played the wife's part with no spirit, I feel convinced. As to "Act V., A Cottage," with an "interval of twenty years supposed to elapse" between that and the preceding act, I doubt whether she would ever have reached it at all.

I imparted these views of mine as delicately as I could to my accomplished friend, but they produced no impression on him. He told me kindly but firmly that I was altogether mistaken. He had, he said, made a particularly careful study of Eleanor's Rh