“It is very good of you to think so,” he answered, still humbly, “and since there is no one else you care for, perhaps in time—”
He left the sentence hanging in the air, as if afraid to finish it, and neither this modesty nor the yearning tenderness of his accent was lost upon the girl.
“As you say, there is no one else.”
“But—but there might be,” suggested Rollinson, who was strongly possessed by the insane delusion of the lover that all men must needs worship his lady. “Bertha! If you are going to learn to love me, make haste to be kind. I am horribly unreasonable. I see a rival in every man you speak to, dance with, smile at. Until my probation is over I should like to depopulate the world you move in. I want, at least, to be rejected on my own demerits, not because of the merits of another man!”
Bertha regarded him attentively, still with that serious, candid air.
“Indeed, I will try,” she murmured, and for the moment he wisely said no more.
Rollinson had been a thoughtful youth, who early conceived of old age—which he thought began between forty and forty-five—as one of the most desirable periods of life.
“Patience! Afterwards,” he had said to himself during the storm and stress, the confusion and uncertainty of youth—“afterwards, when I am old, when all this fermentation has ceased, when I know what I think, what I feel, what I want and can do, how glorious life will be!”
And in accordance with this conception, as he advanced in years, he looked confidently for the subsidence of the swelling tide of his prejudices, passions, partialities, and for the emergence of reason undefiled as the second Ararat upon which the long-tossed and buffeted ark of his mind might rest.
To say the least, he was taken aback when, in the midst of those ripe years, whose fruitage he had hoped to gather in great peace, he came again upon tempestuous days. In brief, when past forty, it befell him to love as he had never loved before, and with an unrest far exceeding that of youth, for he could not fail to see that the chances were by rights against him.