What was the plain man to make of it?
And nowadays the plain man settles everything.
Well!--if the book came to grief, it was not only he that would suffer .-- Poor Eleanor!--poor, kind, devoted Eleanor! Yet as the thought of her passed through his meditations, a certain annoyance mingled with it.

What if she had been helping to keep him, all this time, in a fool's paradise--hiding the truth from him by this soft enveloping sympathy of hers?
His mind started these questions freely.

Yet only to brush them away with a sense of shame.

Beneath his outer controlling egotism there were large and generous elements in his mixed nature.

And nothing could stand finally against the memory of that sweet all-sacrificing devotion which had been lavished upon himself and his work all the winter! What right had he to accept it?
What did it mean?
Where was it leading?
He guessed pretty shrewdly what had been the speculations of the friends and acquaintances who had seen them together in Rome.