Chapter 19

CHAPTER XIX.

Instead of resuming his investigation of South's brain, which
perhaps was not so interesting under the microscope as might have
been expected from the importance of that organ in life, Fitzpiers
reclined and ruminated on the interview. Grace's curious
susceptibility to his presence, though it was as if the currents
of her life were disturbed rather than attracted by him, added a
special interest to her general charm. Fitzpiers was in a
distinct degree scientific, being ready and zealous to interrogate
all physical manifestations, but primarily he was an idealist. He
believed that behind the imperfect lay the perfect; that rare
things were to be discovered amid a bulk of commonplace; that
results in a new and untried case might be different from those in
other cases where the conditions had been precisely similar.
Regarding his own personality as one of unbounded possibilities,
because it was his own--notwithstanding that the factors of his
life had worked out a sorry product for thousands--he saw nothing
but what was regular in his discovery at Hintock of an altogether
exceptional being of the other sex, who for nobody else would have
had any existence.

One habit of Fitzpiers's--commoner in dreamers of more advanced
age than in men of his years--was that of talking to himself. He
paced round his room with a selective tread upon the more
prominent blooms of the carpet, and murmured, "This phenomenal
girl will be the light of my life while I am at Hintock; and the
special beauty of the situation is that our attitude and relations
to each other will be purely spiritual. Socially we can never be
intimate. Anything like matrimonial intentions towards her,
charming as she is, would be absurd. They would spoil the
ethereal character of my regard. And, indeed, I have other aims
on the practical side of my life."

Fitzpiers bestowed a regulation thought on the advantageous
marriage he was bound to make with a woman of family as good as
his own, and of purse much longer. But as an object of
contemplation for the present, as objective spirit rather than
corporeal presence, Grace Melbury would serve to keep his soul
alive, and to relieve the monotony of his days.

His first notion--acquired from the mere sight of her without
converse--that of an idle and vulgar flirtation with a timber-
merchant's pretty daughter, grated painfully upon him now that he
had found what Grace intrinsically was. Personal intercourse with
such as she could take no lower form than intellectual communion,
and mutual explorations of the world of thought. Since he could
not call at her father's, having no practical views, cursory
encounters in the lane, in the wood, coming and going to and from