Chapter 31

A fortnight went by. Fan, occupied in her shop and happy enough, except
once when she encountered the grisly manager's terrible eyes on her: then
she trembled and glanced down at her dress, fearing that it had looked
rusty or out of shape to him; for in that establishment a heavy fine or
else dismissal would be the lot of any girl who failed to look well-
dressed. Constance, for the most part sitting solitary at home, trying in
vain to write something that would meet the views of some editor. Merton,
busy running about, full to overflowing of all the things he intended
doing. Eden, doing nothing: only thinking, which, in his case at all
events, was "but an idle waste of thought." So inactive was he at this
period, and so much tobacco did he consume to assist his mental
processes, that he grew languid and pale. His friends remarked that he
was looking seedy. This made him angry--very angry for so slight a cause;
and he thought that of all the intolerable things that have to be put up
with this was the worst--that people should remark to a man that he is
looking seedy, when the seediness is in the soul, and the cause of it a
secret of which he is ashamed.

At the end of the fortnight he became convinced that his feeling for the
delicate girl with the pathetic grey eyes was no passing fancy, but a
passion that stirred him as he had never been stirred before, and he
resolved to possess her in spite of the fact that he had met her in his
friend's house.

"Let the great river bear me to the main," he said; although bad, he was
too honest to quote the other line, feeling that he had not striven
against the stream.

Having got so far, he began to consider what the first step was to be in
this enterprise of great pith and moment. For although the insanity of
passionate desire possessed him, he was not going to spoil his chances by
acting in a hurry, or doing anything without the most careful
consideration. The desire to see her again was very insistent, and by
strolling up the street in which she lived in the evening he might easily
have met her, by chance as it were, returning from her shop, but he would
not do that. An enterprise of this kind seemed to him like one of those
puzzle-games in which if a right move is made at first the game may be
won, however many blundering moves may follow; but if the first move is
wrong, then by no possible skill and care can the desired end be reached.

He recalled their conversation about novels, and remembered the titles of
five popular works he had mentioned which Miss Affleck had not read.
These works he ordered in the six-shilling form, and then spent the best
part of a day cutting the leaves and knocking the books about to give
them the