General D’Hubert was proud and reserved.  He had not been damaged by his casual love affairs, successful or otherwise.  In his war-scarred body his heart at forty remained unscratched.  Entering with reserve into his sister’s matrimonial plans, he had felt himself falling irremediably in love as one falls off a roof.  He was too proud to be frightened.  Indeed, the sensation was too delightful to be alarming.

The inexperience of a man of forty is a much more serious thing than the inexperience of a youth of twenty, for it is not helped out by the rashness of hot blood.  The girl was mysterious, as young girls are by the mere effect of their guarded ingenuity; and to him the mysteriousness of that young girl appeared exceptional and fascinating.  But there was nothing mysterious about the arrangements of the match which Madame Leonie had promoted.  There was nothing peculiar, either.  It was a very appropriate match, commending itself extremely to the young lady’s mother (the father was dead) and tolerable to the young lady’s uncle—­an old emigre lately returned from Germany, and pervading, cane in hand, a lean ghost of the ancien regime, the garden walks of the young lady’s ancestral home.

General D’Hubert was not the man to be satisfied merely with the woman and the fortune—­when it came to the point.  His pride (and pride aims always at true success) would be satisfied with nothing short of love.  But as true pride excludes vanity, he could not imagine any reason why this mysterious creature with deep and brilliant eyes of a violet colour should have any feeling for him warmer than indifference.  The young lady (her name was Adele) baffled every attempt at a clear understanding on that point.  It is true that the attempts were clumsy and made timidly, because by then General D’Hubert had become acutely aware of the number of his years, of his wounds, of his many moral imperfections, of his secret unworthiness—­and had incidentally learned by experience the meaning of the word funk.  As far as he could make out she seemed to imply that, with an unbounded confidence in her mother’s affection and sagacity, she felt no unsurmountable dislike for the person of General D’Hubert; and that this was quite sufficient for a well-brought-up young lady to begin married life upon.  This view hurt and tormented the pride of General D’Hubert.  And yet he asked himself, with a sort of sweet despair, what more could he expect?  She had a quiet and luminous forehead.  Her violet eyes laughed while the lines of her lips and chin remained composed in admirable gravity.  All this was set off by such a glorious mass of fair hair, by a complexion so marvellous, by such a grace of expression, that General D’Hubert really never found the opportunity to examine with sufficient detachment the lofty exigencies of his pride.  In fact, he became shy of that line of inquiry since it had led once or twice to a crisis of solitary passion in which it was borne upon him that he loved her enough to kill her rather than lose her.  From such passages, not unknown to men of forty, he would come out broken, exhausted, remorseful, a little dismayed.  He derived, however, considerable comfort from the quietist practice of sitting now and then half the night by an open window and meditating upon the wonder of her existence, like a believer lost in the mystic contemplation of his faith.