His future career as a landowner and politician was by no means clear to him.

One thing only was clear to him--that to dogmatise about any subject under heaven, at the present day, more than the immediate practical occasion absolutely demanded, was the act of an idiot.
So that Aldous Raeburn's moments of reflection had been constantly mixed with struggle of different kinds.

And the particular point of view where he stood on this September evening had been often associated in his memory with flashes of self-realisation which were, on the whole, more of a torment to him than a joy.

If he had not been Aldous Raeburn, or any other person, tied to a particular individuality, with a particular place and label in the world, the task of the analytic mind, in face of the spectacle of what is, would have been a more possible one!--so it had often seemed to him.
But to-night all this cumbering consciousness, all these self-made doubts and worries, had for the moment dropped clean away! A transfigured man it was that lingered at the old spot--a man once more young, divining with enchantment the approach of passion, feeling at last through all his being the ecstasy of a self-surrender, long missed, long hungered for.
Six weeks was it since he had first seen her--this tall, straight, Marcella Boyce?
He shut his eyes impatiently against the disturbing golds and purples of the sunset, and tried to see her again as she had walked beside him across the church fields, in that thin black dress, with, the shadow of the hat across her brow and eyes--the small white teeth flashing as she talked and smiled, the hand so ready with its gesture, so restless, so alive! What a presence--how absorbing, troubling, preoccupying! No one in her company could forget her--nay, could fail to observe her.

What ease and daring, and yet no hardness with it--rather deep on deep of womanly weakness, softness, passion, beneath it all! How straight she had flung her questions at him!--her most awkward embarrassing questions.