Tallente, who for the last ten years had looked upon the other sex as non-existent, crushed into an uninteresting negation for him owing to his wife's cold and shadowy existence, twice within the last few months found himself pass in a different way under the greatest spell in life.

Nora Miall had provoked his curiosity, had reawakened a dormant sense of sex without attracting it towards herself.
Jane brought to him again, from the first moment he had seen her, that half-wistful recrudescence of the sentiment of his earlier days.

He was amazed to find how once more in her presence that sentiment had taken to itself fire and life, how different a thing it was from those first dreams of her, which had seemed like an echo from the period of his poetry-reading youth.

Of all women in the world she seemed to him now the most desirable.

That she was unattainable he was perfectly willing to admit.