To Wharton would belong not only the popular _kudos_ of the matter, but much more, and above all, Marcella's gratitude.
Aldous pulled up his horse an instant, recognising that spot in the road, that downward stretching glade among the beeches, where he had asked Marcella to be his wife.

The pale February sunlight was spreading from his left hand through the bare grey trunks, and over the distant shoulders of the woods, far into the white and purple of the chalk plain.

Sounds of labour came from the distant fields; sounds of winter birds from the branches round him.

The place, the time, raised in him all the intensest powers of consciousness.

He saw himself as the man _standing midway_ in everything--speculation, politics, sympathies--as the perennially ineffective and, as it seemed to his morbid mood, the perennially defeated type, beside the Whartons of this world.