David meets Dora Spenlow at her father’s house, where an ordinary visit turns almost at once into the defining beginning of his infatuation. The episode unfolds from a garden walk to an evening introduction and a further meeting the next morning. In retrospect, David presents the encounter both as a decisive emotional turn and as a youthful attachment whose intensity he can now describe with affectionate self-mockery.

The House and the Introduction

Mr. Spenlow’s garden first catches David’s attention. Although the season is not at its best for flowers, he admires its careful maintenance, lawn, groups of trees, and perspective walks beneath trellis-work. The garden becomes a setting for imagining Dora before he has met her: learning that Mr. Spenlow’s daughter walks there, David is already absorbed by the sound of her name. The scene shows his readiness to invest an anticipated meeting with romantic meaning.

Inside the house, a brightly lit hall crowded with hats, coats, gloves, whips, and walking sticks leads the visitors into a room near the breakfast room. Mr. Spenlow introduces his daughter and her confidential friend. David recalls that the introduction barely registers as a social exchange: his attention has fixed on Dora, and he describes his response as immediate surrender. The confidential friend is Miss Murdstone, a familiar presence from David’s earlier life. Her appearance interrupts the privacy of his first impression, but does not displace Dora from his attention.

Infatuation at First Sight

David’s account makes clear that his response is idealizing rather than measured. He imagines Dora as more than human, assigning her the qualities of a fairy or sylph and describing his love as instantaneous. The language belongs to the older narrator looking back at a younger self who, as he admits, had no pause for judgment or reflection. The speed of the feeling is the event’s central turn: before he has spoken to Dora, he has made her the center of an imagined romantic world.

During the evening, Dora sings French ballads and accompanies herself on an instrument resembling a guitar. David remains absorbed in her, declines refreshments, and remembers the evening as a state of blissful delirium. When Miss Murdstone takes Dora away, Dora smiles and gives him her hand. David then catches sight of himself in a mirror and sees a foolish-looking young man; the recollection of his own appearance punctures, without undoing, the grand emotional drama he has assigned to the evening. He goes to bed in a confused state of infatuation and wakes still under its influence.

The Morning Conversation

The next morning, David walks alone through the garden, imagining the happiness that an engagement might bring. His ambitions are modest in his own telling: he wants to call Dora by her first name, write to her, admire her, and believe she remembers him when she is elsewhere. He distinguishes this youthful desire from calculation about marriage or fortune, and recognizes how little he had thought beyond the privilege of closeness. His later judgment that he was a foolish young admirer is tempered by his insistence that the feeling was sincere.

When he meets Dora, he struggles to speak. She explains that home feels dull and complains of Miss Murdstone’s advice that she should wait for the day to be aired before going out. David attempts a compliment by saying that the morning seems brighter to him than it did moments earlier. Dora asks whether he means the weather or is paying her a compliment. He stammers that he means his own feelings, not a change in the weather. The exchange gives their meeting a brief reciprocity: Dora teases him with a direct question, while he tries, awkwardly, to make his feelings understood.

The Garden Remembered

The pair walk among the geraniums in the greenhouse. Dora pauses to admire the flowers and holds her little dog up to them; David follows her attention and later recalls the tableau through the straw hat and blue ribbons, her curls, the dog, and the flowering plants. The remembered arrangement of people and objects becomes a lasting image of the encounter. Even years later, the scent of a geranium leaf brings the scene back to him, showing how a small detail can carry the force of an entire remembered attachment.

Miss Murdstone finds them and takes Dora’s arm, leading them in to breakfast. David remembers drinking cup after cup of tea because Dora had made it. At church, Miss Murdstone sits between them, but David’s attention remains fixed on Dora; the sermon recedes from his memory. These interruptions establish the practical limits around his private idealization, while his retrospective narration shows how thoroughly he once transformed a visit, a walk, and a morning conversation into a romance. The episode’s significance lies both in the suddenness of his attachment and in the contrast between the young man’s uncritical adoration and the older narrator’s amused, still-tender recollection.