it interested him because she had chosen to put it there.  For these reasons he was led to observe the rose more closely.  He discovered that the effect in itself was beautiful, and it fascinated him.  His ingenuous delight in it was a delight to her, and a new and mutual love-thrill was theirs—because of a flower.  Straightway he became a lover of flowers.  Also, he became an inventor in gallantry.  He sent her a bunch of violets.  The idea was his own.  He had never heard of a man sending flowers to a woman.  Flowers were used for decorative purposes, also for funerals.  He sent Genevieve flowers nearly every day, and so far as he was concerned the idea was original, as positive an invention as ever arose in the mind of man.

He was tremulous in his devotion to her—as tremulous as was she in her reception of him.  She was all that was pure and good, a holy of holies not lightly to be profaned even by what might possibly be the too ardent reverence of a devotee.  She was a being wholly different from any he had ever known.  She was not as other girls.  It never entered his head that she was of the same clay as his own sisters, or anybody’s sister.  She was more than mere girl, than mere woman.  She was—well, she was Genevieve, a being of a class by herself, nothing less than a miracle of creation.

And for her, in turn, there was in him but little less of illusion.  Her judgment of him in minor things might be critical (while his judgment of her was sheer worship, and had in it nothing critical at all); but in her judgment of him as a whole she forgot the sum of the parts, and knew him only as a creature of wonder, who gave meaning to life, and for whom she could die as willingly as she could live.  She often beguiled her waking dreams of him with fancied situations, wherein, dying for him, she at last adequately expressed the love she felt for him, and which, living, she knew she could never fully express.

Their love was