Had he ever had a love affair, be it never so mild a one, he would have known that love requires a positive expression.

It is not sufficient to sigh, and wish, and hope, and long, all to oneself.
Stephen felt instinctively that his guarded speech and manner were due to the coldness--or rather the trusting abated worship--of the brotherhood to which she had been always accustomed.

At the time when new forces were manifesting and expanding themselves within her; when her growing instincts, cultivated by the senses and the passions of young nature, made her aware of other forces, new and old, expanding themselves outside her; at the time when the heart of a girl is eager for new impressions and new expansions, and the calls of sex are working within her all unconsciously, Harold, to whom her heart would probably have been the first to turn, made himself in his effort to best show his love, a _quantite negligeable_.
Thus Stephen, whilst feeling that the vague desires of budding womanhood were trembling within her, had neither thought nor knowledge of their character or their ultimate tendency.

She would have been shocked, horrified, had that logical process, which she applied so freely to less personal matters, been used upon her own intimate nature.

In her case logic would of course act within a certain range; and as logic is a conscious intellectual process, she became aware that her objective was man.