he was prone to believe, in his apparent freshness, his ostensible quality of having remained untouched, a quality, he knew, to be sure, to be a creation of her own fancy, but he made no effort to dislodge this error from her mind. Furthermore, he reflected, had she known everything there was to know, she might still have found him comparatively inexperienced. She could not, in any case, so long as he concealed the truth from her, have any conception of how much he had already lived in his imagination, how much he had already felt. Above all else, she could not be aware, he perceived, that he was prepared to leap all chasms, to break all bonds. It was impossible for her to realize that she had met, perhaps for the first time in her life, a boy who, however innocent of active participation, was almost entirely free from inhibitions, prejudices, who was intolerant only of superstitions, conventions, and village moral idiocies. It was quite apparent to him, almost from the outset, that a revelation of this fact might have the undesirable effect of destroying her interest. It was entirely conceivable that by far the greater part of her present feeling for him was created by her hope of conquering his imagined reluctance.
Sitting alone one day in his study among his books and photographs, he considered these matters. Before him, on his desk, in an engraved silver frame, stood a photograph of the Countess, taken by Reutlinger in Paris. It was a photograph in
