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 church, or in passing
her dwelling, were what the acquaintance would have to feed on.