Langbourne went to bed as soon as he reached his hotel because he found
himself spent with the experience of the evening; but as he rested from
his fatigue he grew wakeful, and he tried to get its whole measure and
meaning before him. He had a methodical nature, with a necessity for
order in his motions, and he now balanced one fact against another none
the less passionately because the process was a series of careful
recognitions. He perceived that the dream in which he had lived for the
year past was not wholly an illusion. One of the girls whom he had heard
but not seen was what he had divined her to be: a dominant influence, a
control to which the other was passively obedient. He had not erred
greatly as to the face or figure of the superior, but he had given all
the advantages to the wrong person. The voice, indeed, the spell which
had bound him, belonged with the one to whom he had attributed it, and
the qualities with which it was inextricably blended in his fancy were
hers; she was more like his ideal than the other, though he owned that
the other was a charming girl too, and that in the thin treble of her
voice lurked a potential fascination which might have made itself
ascendently felt if he had happened to feel it first.
There was a dangerous instant in which he had a perverse question of
changing his allegiance. This passed into another moment, almost as
perilous, of confusion through a primal instinct of the man's by which
he yields a double or a divided allegiance and simultaneously worships
at two shrines; in still another breath he was aware that this was
madness.
If he had been younger, he would have had no doubt as to his right in
the circumstances. He had simply corresponded all winter with Miss
Simpson; but though he had opened his heart freely and had invited her
to the same confidence with him, he had not committed himself, and he
had a right to drop the whole affair. She would have no right to
complain; she had not committed herself either: they could both come off
unscathed. But he was now thirty-five, and life had taught him something
concerning the rights of others which he could not ignore. By seeking
her confidence and by offering her his, he had given her a claim which
was none the less binding because it was wholly tacit. There had been a
time when he might have justified himself in dropping the affair; that
was when she had failed to answer his letter; but he had come to see her
in defiance of her silence, and now he could not withdraw, simply
because he was disappointed, without cruelty, without atrocity.
This was what the girl's wistful eyes said to him; this was the reproach
of her trembling lips; this was the accusation of her dejected figure,
as she drooped in vision before him on the piano-stool and passed her
hand soundlessly over the key-board. He tried to own to her that he was
disappointed, but he could not get the words out of his throat; and now
in her presence, as it were, he was not sure that he was disappointed.