But he had not survived four years of bodily and spiritual disaster
without an irreparable destruction of the sanguine, if more or less
nebulous assurance that God was in his heaven and all was well with
the world. He had been stricken with a wariness concerning life, a
reluctant distrust of much that in his old easy-going philosophy
seemed solid as the hills. He was disposed to a critical and sometimes
pessimistic examination of his own feelings and of other people's
actions.
So love for Doris Cleveland did not steal upon him like a thief in the
night. From the hour when he put her in the taxi at the dock and went
away with her address in his pocket, he was keenly alive to the
definite quality of attraction peculiar to her. When he was not
thinking of her, he was thinking of himself in relation to her. He
found himself involved in the most intimate sort of speculation
concerning her. From the beginning he did not close his eyes to a
possibility which might become a fact. Six months earlier he would
honestly have denied that any woman could linger so tenaciously in his
mind, a lovely vision to gladden and disturb him in love's paradoxical
way.
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