Page:Alice Lauder.pdf/102

one or two other shades of lover-like mien appeared against the tapestry of memory. Once or twice she had almost been on the point of very nearly feeling a half or quarter or decimal shade of “attachment”—one could not call it anything else—to one or other of these shadows. There was one—a wild-eyed, fair-haired, consumptive Polish student, with a look of genius or insanity (it was hard to say which) stamped on his mobile boy’s features, and whose long musical, spider-like fingers drew out such heartpiercing music from the violin—who now seemed to pursue her with phantasmal pleadings. He always wanted Alice to be the saving of him, but she never could see her way to it. Now, it was evident that Arthur Campbell did not need saving. A man who is always going about the world, making sums on the edges of newspapers (as she recollected his doing), and carrying on Platonic flirtations with pretty married women, could not be much in need of her compassion or interest; and so for the fiftieth time she gave up thinking about it and began to think of something else, with the result that her mind wandered again and again round in the same track, like travellers who lose their way in the forest and return despairingly to the same point they set out from. At last she called up all her