Baruch was now in love. He had fallen in love with Clara suddenly and totally. His tendency to reflectiveness did not diminish his passion: it rather augmented it. The men and women whose thoughts are here and there continually are not the people to feel the full force of love. Those who do feel it are those who are accustomed to think of one thing at a time, and to think upon it for a long time. ‘No man,’ said Baruch once, ‘can love a woman unless he loves God.’ ‘I should say,’ smilingly replied the Gentile, ‘that no man can love God unless he loves a woman.’ ‘I am right,’ said Baruch, ‘and so are you.’

But Baruch looked in the glass: his hair, jet black when he was a youth, was marked with grey, and once more the thought came to him—this time with peculiar force—that he could not now expect a woman to love him as she had a right to demand that he should love, and that he must be silent. He was obliged to call upon Barnes in about a fortnight’s time. He still read Hebrew, and he had seen in the shop a copy of the Hebrew translation of the Moreh Nevochim of Maimonides, which he greatly coveted, but could not afford to buy. Like every true book-lover, he could not make up his mind when he wished for a book which was beyond his means that he ought once for all to renounce it, and he was guilty of subterfuges quite unworthy of such a reasonable creature in order to delude himself into the belief that he might yield. For example, he wanted a new overcoat badly, but determined it was more prudent to wait, and a week afterwards very nearly came to the conclusion that as he had not ordered the coat he had actually accumulated a fund from which the Moreh Nevochim might be purchased. When he came to the shop he saw Barnes was there, and he persuaded himself he should have a quieter moment or two with the precious volume when Clara was alone. Barnes, of course, gossiped with everybody.

He therefore called again in the evening, about half an hour before closing time, and found that Barnes had gone home. Clara was busy with a catalogue, the proof of which she was particularly anxious to send to the printer that night. He did not disturb her, but took down the Maimonides, and for a few moments was lost in revolving the doctrine, afterwards repeated and proved by a greater than Maimonides, that the will and power of God are co-extensive: that there is nothing which might be and is not. It was familiar to Baruch, but like all ideas of that quality and magnitude—and there are not many of them—it was always new and affected him like a starry night, seen hundreds of times, yet for ever infinite and original.

But was it Maimonides which kept him till the porter began to put up the shutters? Was he pondering exclusively upon God as the folio lay open before him? He did think about Him, but whether he would have thought about Him for nearly twenty minutes if Clara had not been there is another matter.

‘Do you walk home alone?’ he said as she gave the proof to the boy who stood waiting.

‘Yes, always.’

‘I am going to see Marshall to-night, but I must go to Newman Street first. I shall be glad to walk with you, if you do not mind diverging a little.’

She consented and they went along Oxford Street without speaking, the roar of the carriages and waggons preventing a word.

They turned, however, into Bloomsbury, and were able to hear one another. He had much to say and he could not begin to say it. There was a great mass of something to be communicated pent up within him, and he would have liked to pour it all out before her at once. It is just at such times that we often take up as a means of expression and relief that which is absurdly inexpressive and irrelevant.

‘I have not seen your sister yet; I hope I may see her this evening.’

‘I hope you may, but she frequently suffers from headache and prefers to be alone.’

‘How do you like Mr Barnes?’

The answer is not worth recording, nor is any question or answer which was asked or returned for the next quarter of an hour worth recording, although they were so interesting then. When they were crossing Bedford Square on their return Clara happened to say amongst other commonplaces,—

‘What a relief a quiet space in London is.’

‘I do not mind the crowd if I am by myself.’

‘I do not like crowds; I dislike even the word, and dislike “the masses” still more. I do not want to think of human beings as if they were a cloud of dust, and as if each atom had no separate importance. London is often horrible to me for that reason. In the country it was not quite so bad.’

‘That is an illusion,’ said Baruch after a moment’s pause.

‘I do not quite understand you, but if it be an illusion it is very painful. In London human beings seem the commonest, cheapest things in the world, and I am one of them. I went with Mr Marshall not long ago to a Free Trade Meeting, and more than two thousand people were present. Everybody told me it was magnificent, but it made me very sad.’ She was going on, but she stopped. How was it, she thought again, that she could be so communicative? How was it? How is it that sometimes a stranger crosses our path, with whom, before we have known him for more than an hour, we have no secrets? An hour? we have actually known him for centuries.

She could not understand it, and she felt as if she had been inconsistent with her constant professions of wariness in self-revelation.

‘It is an illusion, nevertheless—an illusion of the senses. It is difficult to make what I mean clear, because insight is not possible beyond a certain point, and clearness does not come until penetration is complete and what we acquire is brought into a line with other acquisitions. It constantly happens that we are arrested short of this point, but it would be wrong to suppose that our conclusions, if we may call them so, are of no value.’

She was silent, and he did not go on. At last he said,—

‘The illusion lies in supposing that number, quantity and terms of that kind are applicable to any other than sensuous objects, but I cannot go further, at least not now. After all, it is possible here in London for one atom to be of eternal importance to another.’

They had gone quite round Bedford Square without entering Great Russell Street, which was the way eastwards. A drunken man was holding on by the railings of the Square. He had apparently been hesitating for some time whether he could reach the road, and, just as Baruch and Clara came up to him, he made a lurch towards it, and nearly fell over them. Clara instinctively seized Baruch’s arm in order to avoid the poor, staggering mortal; they went once more to the right, and began to complete another circuit. Somehow her arm had been drawn into Baruch’s, and there it remained.

‘Have you any friends in London?’ said Baruch.

‘There are Mrs Caffyn, her son and daughter, and there is Mr A. J. Scott. He was a friend of my father.’

‘You mean the Mr Scott who was Irving’s assistant?’

‘Yes.’

‘An addition—’ he was about to say, ‘an additional bond’ but he corrected himself. ‘A bond between us; I know Mr Scott.’

‘Do you really? I suppose you know many interesting people in London, as you are in his circle.’

‘Very few; weeks, months have passed since anybody has said as much to me as you have.’

His voice quivered a little, for he was trembling with an emotion quite inexplicable by mere intellectual relationship. Something came through Clara’s glove as her hand rested on his wrist which ran through every nerve and sent the blood into his head.

Clara felt his excitement and dreaded lest he should say something to which she could give no answer, and when they came opposite Great Russell Street, she withdrew her arm from his, and began to cross to the opposite pavement. She turned the conversation towards some indifferent subject, and in a few minutes they were at Great Ormond Street. Baruch would not go in as he had intended; he thought it was about to rain, and he was late. As he went along he became calmer, and when he was fairly indoors he had passed into a despair entirely inconsistent—superficially—with the philosopher Baruch, as inconsistent as the irrational behaviour in Bedford Square. He could well enough interpret, so he believed, Miss Hopgood’s suppression of him. Ass that he was not to see what he ought to have known so well, that he was playing the fool to her; he, with a grown-up son, to pretend to romance with a girl! At that moment she might be mocking him, or, if she was too good for mockery, she might be contriving to avoid or to quench him. The next time he met her, he would be made to understand that he was pitied, and perhaps he would then learn the name of the youth who was his rival, and had won her. He would often meet her, no doubt, but of what value would anything he could say be to her. She could not be expected to make fine distinctions, and there was a class of elderly men, to which of course he would be assigned, but the thought was too horrible.

Perhaps his love for Clara might be genuine; perhaps it was not. He had hoped that as he grew older he might be able really to see a woman, but he was once more like one of the possessed. It was not Clara Hopgood who was before him, it was hair, lips, eyes, just as it was twenty years ago, just as it was with the commonest shop-boy he met, who had escaped from the counter, and was waiting at an area gate. It was terrible to him to find that he had so nearly lost his self-control, but upon this point he was unjust to himself, for we are often more distinctly aware of the strength of the temptation than of the authority within us, which falteringly, but decisively, enables us at last to resist it.

Then he fell to meditating how little his studies had done for him. What was the use of them? They had not made him any stronger, and he was no better able than other people to resist temptation. After twenty years continuous labour he found himself capable of the vulgarest, coarsest faults and failings from which the remotest skiey influence in his begetting might have saved him.

Clara was not as Baruch. No such storm as that which had darkened and disheartened him could pass over her, but she could love, perhaps better than he, and she began to love him. It was very natural to a woman such as Clara, for she had met a man who had said to her that what she believed was really of some worth. Her father and mother had been very dear to her; her sister was very dear to her, but she had never received any such recognition as that which had now been offered to her: her own self had never been returned to her with such honour. She thought, too—why should she not think it?—of the future, of the release from her dreary occupation, of a happy home with independence, and she thought of the children that might be. She lay down without any misgiving. She was sure he was in love with her; she did not know much of him, certainly, in the usual meaning of the word, but she knew enough. She would like to find out more of his history; perhaps without exciting suspicion she might obtain it from Mrs Caffyn.