For he meant quite simply to marry Eunice Goodward if she would have him, and it was no vanity which gave him hope, but a tribute to her fineness as being able to see herself so absolutely the one thing his life waited for.

He knew himself, modestly, no prize for her except as he was added to by inestimable passion.
Whatever she saw in him as a man, for her not to recognize the immortal worth of what he was able to become under her hand, was to subtract something from her perfections.

In her acceptance would lie the Queen's touch, redeeming him from all commonness.
He made his first venture within a week after their first meeting, in a call on Miss Goodward and her mother in Trethgarten Square, where he found their red brick, vine-masked front distinguishable among half a hundred others by being kept open as late as the middle of June.

To their being marooned thus in a desert of boarded-up doors and shuttered windows, due, as Eunice had frankly and charmingly let him know, to their being poor among their kind, he doubtless owed it that no other callers came to disturb the languid afternoon.

Seen against her proper background of things precious but worn, and in the style of a preceding generation, the girl showed even lovelier than before, with the rich, perfumed quality of a flower held in a chipped porcelain vase, a flower moreover secure in its own perfectness, waiting only to be worn, disdaining alike to offer or resist.