It had come, at last, love had come, when I least expected it and under the most forbidding conditions.

Of course, my philosophy had always recognized the inevitableness of the love-call sooner or later; but long years of bookish silence had made me inattentive and unprepared.
And now it had come! Maud Brewster! My memory flashed back to that first thin little volume on my desk, and I saw before me, as though in the concrete, the row of thin little volumes on my library shelf.

How I had welcomed each of them! Each year one had come from the press, and to me each was the advent of the year.

They had voiced a kindred intellect and spirit, and as such I had received them into a camaraderie of the mind; but now their place was in my heart.
My heart?
A revulsion of feeling came over me.

I seemed to stand outside myself and to look at myself incredulously.