Perfectly conscious that he had been capable of loving her; aware, too, that his experience had left him on that borderland only through his cool refusal to cross it and face a hopeless battle already lost, he leisurely and mentally took the measure of his own state of mind, and found all well, all intact; found himself still master of his affections, and probably clear-minded enough to remain so under the circumstances.
To such a man as he, impulse to love, capacity to love, did not mean instant capsizing with a flop into sentimental tempests, where swamped, ardent and callow youth raises a hysterically selfish clamour for reciprocity or death.

His nature partly, partly his character, accounted for this balance; and, in part, a rather wide experience with women of various degrees counted more.
So, by instinct and experience, normally temperate, only what was abnormal and inherited might work a mischief in this man.

His listlessness, his easy acquiescence, were but consequent upon the self-knowledge of self-control.

But mastery of the master-vice required something different; he was sick of a sickness; and because, in this sickness, will, mind, and body are tainted too, reason and logic lack clarity; and, to the signals of danger his reply had always been either overconfident or weak--and it had been always the same reply: "Not yet.
There is time." And now, this last week, it had come upon him that the time was now; the skirmish was already on; and it had alarmed him suddenly to find that the skirmish was already a battle, and a rough one.
As he stood there he heard voices on the stairs.

People had already begun to retire, because late cards and point-shooting at dawn do not agree.