How dream-like the whole scene was to Aldous, yet how exquisitely real! The room, with its carved and gilt cedar-wood panels, its Vandykes, its tall windows opening on the park, the autumn sun flooding the gold and purple fruit on the table, and sparkling on the glass and silver, the figures of his aunt and Lady Winterbourne, the moving servants, and dominant of it all, interpreting it all for him anew, the dark, lithe creature beside his grandfather, so quick, sensitive, extravagant, so much a woman, yet, to his lover's sense, so utterly unlike any other woman he had ever seen--every detail of it was charged to him with a thousand new meanings, now oppressive, now delightful.
For he was passing out of the first stage of passion, in which it is, almost, its own satisfaction, so new and enriching is it to the whole nature, into the second stage--the stage of anxiety, incredulity.
Marcella, sitting there on his own ground, after all his planning, seemed to him not nearer, but further from him.

She was terribly on her dignity! Where was all that girlish abandonment gone which she had shown him on that walk, beside the gate?
There had been a touch of it, a divine touch, before luncheon.

How could he get her to himself again?
Meanwhile the conversation passed to the prevailing local topic--the badness of the harvest, the low prices of everything, the consequent depression among the farmers, and stagnation in the villages.
"I don't know what is to be done for the people this winter," said Lord Maxwell, "without pauperising them, I mean.

To give money is easy enough.

Our grandfathers would have doled out coal and blankets, and thought no more of it.