It must have cost him half his
pocket-money to get them smuggled in to her. Why had she only been
amused at them? They might have been beautiful if only one had read them
with sympathy. One day he had caught her alone on the Downs. Evidently
he had made it his business to hang about every day waiting for some such
chance. He had gone down on his knees and kissed her feet, and had been
so abject, so pitiful that she had given him some flowers she was
wearing. And he had sworn to dedicate the rest of his life to being
worthy of her condescension. Poor lad! She wondered--for the first time
since that afternoon--what had become of him. There had been others; a
third cousin who still wrote to her from Egypt, sending her presents that
perhaps he could ill afford, and whom she answered about once a year. And
promising young men she had met at Cambridge, ready, the felt
instinctively, to fall down and worship her. And all the use she had had
for them was to convert them to her views--a task so easy as to be quite
uninteresting--with a vague idea that they might come in handy in the
future, when she might need help in shaping that world of the future.
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