MICHAEL PERIOR was an unfortunate man; unfortunate in his temperament, which was enthusiastic, sensitive, and idealistic; unfortunate in the circumstances with which that temperament found itself called upon to do battle. To a man who had expected less of life the circumstances might have been more amenable and far more endurable, but Perior had the ill-luck to be born with an unmanageable instinct for the best, with an untamable scorn for the second-best. It is not necessary to go into the details of a life which had not spared these qualities nor improved while disillusionizing him. Two blinding buffets met him at its threshold. His father was ruined in a lawsuit, which by every ethical standard he should have won, and Perior was in consequence jilted by the girl whom he had enshrined in his heart as the perfect star of his existence. At twenty-three he found himself under a starless sky, with a heart stupefied at its own emptiness, and in a world of thieves and murderers—for his father died under the shock of disaster, and Perior did not pick his phrases.

The abject common-sense of his ex-fiancÉe could be borne with perhaps more philosophy. He accepted the starlessness as in the nature of things, and his own brief belief in stars as typifying the ignorance of youth; but his father’s death—the crushing out of life rather than its departure—was tragedy, and it was with the sense of inevitable and irretrievable tragedy that he began life. He had been thought clever at Oxford, and had considered himself destined for Parliament. With a huge load of debts upon his back, and an unresigned mother to support, all thoughts of the career for which he had fitted himself were out of the question. He turned to its only equivalent, and took up journalism. He was much in earnest; he believed in a right and in a wrong, and was intolerant of expediency. In a world of interested motives he bore himself with unflinching disapproval. He would limit his freedom by no party partiality, and in the laxity of public life his keen individuality made itself felt like a knife cutting through cheese. At the end of years of very bitter struggle he found himself in a position of some eminence, editor of a courteous, caustic review, whose chief characteristics were a stubborn isolation and a telling of truths that made both friends and foes blink. No half-measures, no half-truths. Conformity with the faintest taint upon it was intolerable to him. His idealism had not evaporated in the storm and stress, it had condensed, rather, into a steely resistance to ugly reality. Insincerity, injustice, meanness, hurt him as badly in middle-age as they had at twenty-five, but he now expected them, and by a stoical presage braced himself against disappointment. The stoicism was only a rather brittle crust, hastily improvised by Nature’s kindly adaptation; he was soured, but his heart was still soft; he expected nothing, and yet he was hurt by everything. It was now some time since he had promised himself that Camelia should never hurt him. Camelia had occupied his thoughts for a good many years. The pretty child, with her face of subdued saint-like curves, and her smile of frank unsaintliness, had seemed to claim him from the very first home-coming. By a final irony of fate poor Mrs. Perior died only a few months before the Grange was freed from its last encumbrances. She had not made life easier for her son. She had always refused to believe in the necessity for letting the Grange, had always resented the lodgings in South Kensington, had always considered herself injured, and had not been chary in demonstrations of injury. Perior had looked forward with pride to the time when he should reinstate her in her own home, and her death made a mockery of his own home-coming.

It was in Camelia’s early girlhood that ill-health, overwork, and a violent row with the powers of political darkness, made this home-coming definite. The battered idealist sought rather sulkily a retreat from the intolerable contemplation of a wider world’s misdeeds. Young Camelia, so different from her dully worthy ancestors, so different even from her dashing but not intellectual papa, charmed him as the woods and flowers of spring charm eyes weary with city winter. She was too young to be taken seriously; that was a lifted weight, in the first place. The joyous receptivity of her mind afforded to his scholarly instincts just the foothold he required to excuse to himself an indulgent and thoughtless affection. As friend and adviser of Lady Paton, he drifted easily into a paternal attitude towards the fatherless Camelia; he was over twenty years her senior, and her eagerness for knowledge appealed to him. As she had said, he taught her nearly everything she knew; she rebelled against other methods, and Perior himself would have felt robbed had governess or tutor supplanted him. During those quiet and pleasant years he felt that on a melancholy walk he had picked a handful of primroses—their pale young gold irradiated his solitude. He did not say to himself that Camelia would never disappoint him, nor own that the handful of primroses meant much in his life, but hopefulness seemed to emanate from her, and insensibly he lived in the sunny impression. Her very defects were charming, the mere superfluity of exuberant vitality, and with this conviction he observed her happy, youthful selfishness as one observes a kitten’s antics, and treated her claims for dominion with gentle ridicule. Camelia laughed with him at herself, and this gave them an irresistible sense of companionship; consoling too, since no defect so humorously recognized could be deep; his primroses still kept their dew. But as she grew older, Perior began to realize uncomfortably that Camelia could laugh at the deepest defect, recognize it, analyze it, and stick to it—a deft combination. This faculty for firm sticking despite obstacles gave the paternal Perior food for reflection, and, as he reflected, he felt with a sudden little turn of terror that he was in a fair way to take Camelia seriously after all. His terror struck him as very cowardly, a shrinking from responsibilities—his, of a truth, to a certain extent. That lightly assumed guardianship meant much in her life. Had he failed in some essential? Was she not the product of her training? He owned with a sigh that the note of true authority it had not been his right to emphasize; yet in defending himself from the probable pain of a deep affection, had he not weakened his claim to a moral influence? And had he defended himself? Perior turned from the question. Camelia respected him, he knew that; and yet his very frankness with her—he, too, had laughed at himself for her benefit—had given her a power over him. He was not at all afraid of seeming priggish, but he was shy before certain contingencies; he knew that he should blunder if he preached, and that Camelia would force him to smile at the blunder and to blur the sermon.

At the age of eighteen he caught her more than once managing, manipulating the plastic elements about her with a skill approaching deceit. The very absence of a necessity for deceit alarmed him; she had so few temptations, there was no way of testing her, yet, that once or twice, when circumstances by a little twist or turn opposed her, he had caught her—too dexterous. Perior had not controlled himself, nor taken the advantage he might have seized. He had immediately lost his balance, exaggerated what Camelia regarded as a quite permissible and pretty compromise into a fault worthy of biting denunciation, and in so doing had given her a point of vantage from which she laughed—not even angrily. Perior for many years had thought most goodness negative, and preferred to see it tested before admiring, but he had forgotten to apply his philosophy in this case. He lost his temper, and Camelia kept hers, kept hers to the extent of soothing him by a smiling confession of her misdoing, an affectionate declaration that she was wrong and he quite right—“But don’t be cross, dear Mr. Perior.” What was he to do? She did not care if she were wrong. Perior thought he would be wiser in the future; he would give Camelia no further opportunity for facile confession; but though the first sting of unexpected disappointment was over, many unmerited aches were still reserved to him—all the more painful from the fact that he had never intended to ache for Camelia. Mary Fairleigh had come to the Patons when Camelia was sixteen, and Camelia’s treatment of her cousin was another and more constant cause for growing discontent. Perior could not define the discomfort with which he watched Camelia’s indifferent kindness, or, worse still, an unkindness as unintentional. He assumed by degrees an attitude of compensatory gentleness towards poor Mary; it held, however, no sting for Camelia; she seemed to watch his doing of the things she left undone very complacently. It was by degrees that his dismay took refuge in a manner of unshocked indifference which he hoped would prove salutary. It did seem to irk and perplex her somewhat, and he had the consolation of thinking that many of her perversities might be intentionally engineered for his benefit. Perior, too, had learned to smile, and Camelia was baffled. He would not scold her. After all, he counted for very little, so Camelia assured herself as she entered upon her London life, and he should see that she could be indifferent with far more effectiveness. Perior saw little of her during those years. The little he saw on his rare visits to London confirmed his grim conviction. She was a pretty, clever, foolish, worthless creature; her frankness threw no dust into his eyes. She might own herself a self-seeking worldling, and she did not overshoot the mark. Many were the corns she danced over in her quest of power and happiness. Her sincerity was insincere—it adapted itself too cleverly. Perior had seen her flatter, when only he and she knew that she was flattering; had seen her make her effect by pliancy or by resistance; had watched her smile light for those who could serve her, or stiffen to a sweet blankness for the incompetent. He recognized in her his own scorn for the world without his ideal, which would not permit him to stoop and use it; but, so Perior thought, Camelia knew no ideals; reality did not hurt her—she met it with its own weapons. One did not conquer an immoral world by moral methods; and if one lived in it, not to conquer it would be intolerable. The scorn no doubt excused her to herself, but it hedged her round with a sort of stupidity from which Perior’s quick recognition of moral beauty preserved him. Ethical worth had come to be everything to him. Camelia simply did not see it. He himself had armed her with that scientific impartiality before which he felt himself rather helpless, before which good and bad resolved themselves into very evasive elements. She told him that her science was more logical than his, it had made her charitable to the whole world, herself included, whereas he was hard on the world and hard on himself. His very kindness lacked grace, while her unkindness wore a flower-like color. He was sorry for people, not fond of them—but Camelia was neither fond nor sorry. They were shadows woven into the web of her experience, her business was to make that experience pleasant, to see it beautifully. It was this love of beauty—beauty in the pagan sense—that baffled him in her. She had put appreciation and an exquisite good taste in the place of morality. Life to her was a game, to him a tragic, insistent conundrum. These, at least, were Perior’s reluctant conclusions.

When he walked away from Enthorpe Lodge his mind was to a certain extent already reverting to the daily preoccupations of cottages, perverse protoplasm, and his weekly article for the Friday Review; but also dwelling with the dual peculiarity observable in our meditations, upon the people he had just left, Lady Paton, Mary, Camelia’s guests, and Camelia herself. It seemed really unnecessary to remind himself of that promise he had made himself some time ago; Camelia could not disappoint him; he knew just what to expect from her; she could not hurt him. Yet the promise had been made at a time when she was hurting him very badly, and even now, while he recalled it with some vehemence, he was feeling a most illogical smart.

The country road wound among dusty hedges and through the little village. About half a mile beyond it lay a remnant of the Perior estate, once large, second only in importance to the Haversham’s, now sadly shrunken and dislocated. By degrees, and during years of only meagre competence, he had built upon this pretty bit of land a cluster of cottages, his playthings; to make them unnecessarily delightful was his perverse pleasure.

Perior was by no means a paternal landlord; the lucky occupants of the cottages were never reminded of the propriety of gratitude. Indeed Perior had enraged neighboring landowners by remarking that the cottages were none too good for the rent—a saying big with implications, and perhaps intentionally spiteful. Indeed intentional spite was attributed to many of his actions. It was a great fox-hunting country; and one of the finest coverts, rich in foxes lovingly preserved by Perior’s forefathers, lay on his estate. Now it was currently reported that Perior had had all the foxes shot! A murder would have made him less unpopular. Malicious insanity seemed the only explanation.

He did not scruple to proclaim his blasphemous heresies on the sacred sport. He grew angry, said he abominated it, would do all in his power to stamp it out, and at least would see that no animal should be “tortured” on his property. The foxes had certainly disappeared from Mandelly Woods, and good, honest sportsmen could hardly trust themselves to mention the criminal fanatic’s name. It must be owned that Perior’s love of animals approached the grotesque. He entertained at the Manor a retinue of battered cats and outcast dogs, many garnered from London streets. He could hardly bear to have surplus kittens drowned, and only by the firmness of the housekeeper was the necessary severity accomplished. He was exaggerated, peculiar, unpractical; the kindest said it of him. He had sent two clever village boys to the University, one the son of the village poacher and ne’er-do-weel, a handsome lad with a Burns-like streak of genius, who had distinguished himself at Oxford, and disappointed many pessimistic prophecies by turning out more than creditably. At the present moment the son of one of Perior’s field-laborers came every day to the Grange for a coaching in the humanities. Perior was a fine master, and Camelia was none too well pleased when she heard of her successor. These experiments in sociology aroused only less hostile comment than the black affair of the foxes.

Our misanthropic gentleman paused at an angle of the road to survey his cottages, each set in its own happy acres, stretching flower-beds and young orchards into the sunny country. His tenants all had a pleasant look of successful adaptation. One was a cobbler, and made most of Perior’s boots; a fact rather apparent.

It was evening by the time he reached the tall gates through which the roadway led up to the Grange, a high-standing, unpretentious, gray stone house, rather bleakly situated on its height, but backed by a further rise of wood, and, despite its vineless severity of outline, gravely cheerful in aspect. An immaculately-kept lawn stretched in a gradual slope before it, shaded by two yew trees, and the light grace of beeches. Under the windows of the ground floor were beds of white and purple pansies, and at one side, near the shrubberies, were long rows of irises, also purple and white. From the other side of the house the ground descended very abruptly, giving one the realization of height, and a long view over woods, hills, and valleys to the distant sunset.

The house within carried out consistently the first impression of pleasant bareness. The wainscotted walls were reflected in the gleaming floors. No tenderness of draperies, no futile ornament. In the drawing-room three old portraits of three dead Mrs. Periors looked quietly from the walls; some good porcelain was on shelves where there was no danger of its breaking; the faded brocade of the furniture was covered with white chintz sprigged with green. The library, where the light came serenely through high windows, was lined with books; here and there on the peaceful spaces a good engraving or etching; philosophical bronzes above the shelves. The writing-table was spacious; opposite it was Perior’s piano—he played well. This was the room he lived in. Now, when he entered, an old setter, glossily well-groomed, looked up with an emotional thudding of the tail, and of two cats curled exquisitely in the easy-chair, one only opened placid eyes, while the other, after arching itself in a yawn, advanced towards him with a soundless mew.

Perior was devoted to his cats, and adored his dogs. After stooping to pat these animals, he took up a letter from the table. Arthur Henge’s writing was familiar, though of late years Perior had rarely seen it. The old friendship had borne pretty sharp twinges—had survived even Perior’s ruthless handling of Henge’s pet measure some years ago: Henge had believed ardently in the bill, and thought Perior responsible to a certain extent for its failure. That Henge had not been embittered by this political antagonism had deeply touched Perior. He always remembered the fact with a delightful, glowing comfort. His respect and fondness for Henge were a staff to him. The two men were intrinsically sympathetic, though they had hardly an opinion in common. Arthur Henge was an optimist, and deeply religious, his wide humanism going hand in hand with a fervent churchmanship. He was aided towards a happy view of things by happy circumstances. He was one of the richest men in England, and one of the most powerful; he held a high place in the present Government. No sword of Damocles in the shape of a peerage hung over his career in the Lower House, and at the same time the baronetcy, hoary with an honorable antiquity, had the consequence and standing of many greater but less significant titles. He was young, handsome, and serious. Above all small cynicisms and hardness, his experience of life seemed only to have taught him a wise, fine trust, and, perhaps in consequence of this attitude of mind, it was impossible not to trust him.

This was the man who had fallen in love with Camelia Paton. The fact was town talk, though it was surmised that despite his evident absorption he had not yet given her occasion to accept him. That he was courting her was not yet apparent, but his devotion remained gravely steady. Lady Henge was supposed to be the cause of this adjournment of decisive measures. Lady Henge was even more serious than her son, and her influence over him was paramount.

Now with all her ready qualities Camelia seldom pretended to seriousness. To Perior there was something highly distasteful in the whole matter. That Camelia should be the object of such comment, that her achievement of the “good match” should be canvassed, infuriated him. No blame could attach itself to Arthur’s reticence; if reticence there were it was on the highest grounds. It was the world’s base, materialistic chatter that jarred, its weighing of her charm and loveliness against his wealth and prominence merely. Perior weighed Camelia’s merits against Arthur’s. In his heart of hearts he did not consider Camelia fitted to make a high-minded man happy—and some dim foreboding of this fact no doubt chilled her lover’s resolution. Perior, however, was not logical. He might not approve of Camelia, but that Lady Henge should disapprove nettled him. Arthur no doubt was a fool in loving Camelia, but Perior wished to be alone in that knowledge. As for the world’s gross view of Henge as one of the greatest “catches” in England, of Camelia as lucky if she got him, Perior’s blood boiled when he thought of it,—and that Camelia, with all her reliance on her own attractions, was quite aware of the world’s opinion and was not angered by it.

She, too, thought Henge a great “catch,” no doubt; a great catch even for Camelia Paton.

Perior read the letter now, standing near the window and frowning very gloomily. It was natural that Henge should write to him in this strain of only thinly-veiled confidence.

Henge knew of the long paternal intimacy with Camelia, and relied perhaps too much on a paternal sympathy. Henge and his mother were coming down to Clievesbury to spend some weeks at Enthorpe. He avowed no intention, but the whole note, its very restraint, was big with intention. He seemed, too, to emphasize his mother’s pleasure in coming, and Perior felt in the emphasis a touch of triumph. He hoped to see a great deal of Perior, there was in the concluding passages of the note quite a prophecy of future relationship, nearer than any they had known. But through it all Perior fancied just the hint of an appeal—a quite unconscious appeal, none the less significant for that.

Camelia was to be put on trial before Lady Henge, and to Arthur the process would be painful. The Henges had stately requirements; and although Perior imagined that, were these requirements not satisfied, Arthur had almost determined to overlook them, he felt the keenness of the hope that all would be satisfactory, the support that the hope found in Perior’s intimacy with Camelia.

Lady Henge shared her son’s respect for Perior, and to her Perior’s friendship could interpret many phases in Camelia’s charming character perplexing to the anxious mother’s unaided vision.

“I am glad my mother is to know her better; she has seen only the surface as yet,” wrote Arthur. Arthur’s love was a surety not quite trustworthy, but the lifelong friendship of a man like Perior must convince grave Lady Henge of many depths. Perior felt that his rigidity was to be made use of. His well-known earnestness was to vouch for Camelia’s. His brow was very black as he finished the letter. He was nearly angry with Arthur.