He had not gone to meeting lest he see Lucina Merritt again, and wished to drive her image from his mind, and here he was peopling his solitude with symbols of her which were bolder than she, and made his hunger worse to bear.
A childlike wonder was over him at the whole.

"Why haven't I ever felt this way before ?" he thought.

He recalled all the young men he knew who had married during the last few years, and thought how they must have felt as he felt now, and he had no conception of it.

He had been secretly rather proud that he had not encumbered himself with a wife and children, but had given his best strength to less selfish loves.

He remembered his scorn of the school-master and his adoring girls, and realized that his scorn had been due, as scorn largely is, to ignorance.