Arundel by E.F. Benson — Read

Edward Holroyd had arranged to go down to Bath for a certain Saturday till Monday, some fortnight after the safe arrival there (on the stroke of five) of Mrs. Hancock's motor. He had spent a couple of rather lonely weeks at Heathmoor since the departure of his neighbours, and he was pleased to find how much he missed Edith. His failure to achieve poignant emotion over his engagement had troubled him; he was distressed about the indolence of his temperament. He had never yet seen a girl whom he so much admired and liked, but the very fact that he was able to contemplate her image and tell himself how charming she was, seemed to him part of that failure. She affected him with the same degree of emotion that a spring morning or a melodious song stirred in him. He could, while basking in her charm, tell himself that he basked; he was not by the exquisitiveness of the conditions rendered in the least oblivious of himself; his sensations had not any overpowering mastery over him.

Duly he sat and thought about her when he got home in the evening from his day in the City, duly and honestly he told himself how delightful her perpetual presence would be to him. But he did not dream and doat; he never lost himself in haze of rapture; he was not blinded by any intolerable brightness. But he wanted immensely to see her again; he missed her as much as he was capable of missing anything. But his industry at his office and his appetite at his dinner were wholly unaffected, though they would quite certainly have been impaired if for any reason his engagement had been broken off. She was the nicest girl he had ever seen, and in the autumn she was going to marry him.