No doubt when the book was done with, their relations must change somewhat.

He confessed that he might have been imprudent; that he might have been appropriating the energies and sympathies of a delightful woman, as a man is hardly justified in doing, unless--.

But, after all, a few weeks more would see the end of it; and friends, dear, close friends, they must always be.
For now there was plenty of room and leisure in his life for these subtler bonds.

The day of great passions was gone by.

There were one or two incidents in his earlier manhood on which he could look back with the half-triumphant consciousness that no man had dived deeper to the heart of feeling, had drunk more wildly, more inventively, of passion than he, in more than one country of Europe, in the East as in the West.