IV

"I wrote her a long letter that night, and waited two days for a reply.

"On the third day I had a brief line saying that she was going to spend

Sunday with some friends who had a place near Riverdale, and that she

would arrange to see me while she was there. That was all.

"It was on a Saturday that I received the note and I came out here the

same night. The next morning was rainy, and I was in despair, for I had

counted on her asking me to take her for a drive or a long walk. It was

hopeless to try to say what I had to say to her in the drawing-room of a

crowded country-house. And only eleven days were left!

"I stayed indoors all the morning, fearing to go out lest she should

telephone me. But no sign came, and I grew more and more restless and

anxious. She was too free and frank for coquetry, but her silence and

evasiveness made me feel that, for some reason, she did not wish to hear

what she knew I meant to say. Could it be that she was, after all, more

conventional, less genuine, than I had thought? I went again and again

over the whole maddening round of conjecture; but the only conclusion I

could rest in was that, if she loved me as I loved her, she would be as

determined as I was to let no obstacle come between us during the days

that were left.

"The luncheon-hour came and passed, and there was no word from her. I

had ordered my trap to be ready, so that I might drive over as soon as

she summoned me; but the hours dragged on, the early twilight came, and

I sat here in this very chair, or measured up and down, up and down, the

length of this very rug--and still there was no message and no letter.

"It had grown quite dark, and I had ordered away, impatiently, the

servant who came in with the lamps: I couldn't _bear_ any definite sign

that the day was over! And I was standing there on the rug, staring at

the door, and noticing a bad crack in its panel, when I heard the

sound of wheels on the gravel. A word at last, no doubt--a line to

explain.... I didn't seem to care much for her reasons, and I stood

where I was and continued to stare at the door. And suddenly it opened

and she came in.

"The servant followed her with a light, and then went out and closed the

door. Her face looked pale in the lamplight, but her voice was as clear

as a bell.

"'Well,' she said, 'you see I've come.'

"I started toward her with hands outstretched. 'You've come--you've

come!' I stammered.

"Yes; it was like her to come in that way--without dissimulation or

explanation or excuse. It was like her, if she gave at all, to give not

furtively or in haste, but openly, deliberately, without stinting

the measure or counting the cost. But her quietness and serenity

disconcerted me. She did not look like a woman who has yielded

impetuously to an uncontrollable impulse. There was something almost

solemn in her face.

"The effect of it stole over me as I looked at her, suddenly subduing

the huge flush of gratified longing.

"'You're here, here, here!' I kept repeating, like a child singing over

a happy word.

"'You said,' she continued, in her grave clear voice, 'that we couldn't

go on as we were--'

"'Ah, it's divine of you!' I held out my arms to her.

"She didn't draw back from them, but her faint smile said, 'Wait,' and

lifting her hands she took the pins from her hat, and laid the hat on

the table.

"As I saw her dear head bare in the lamp-light, with the thick hair

waving away from the parting, I forgot everything but the bliss and

wonder of her being here--here, in my house, on my hearth--that

fourth rose from the corner of the rug is the exact spot where she was

standing....

"I drew her to the fire, and made her sit down in the chair you're in,

and knelt down by her, and hid my face on her knees. She put her hand on

my head, and I was happy to the depths of my soul.

"'Oh, I forgot--' she exclaimed suddenly. I lifted my head and our eyes

met. Hers were smiling.

"She reached out her hand, opened the little bag she had tossed down

with her hat, and drew a small object from it. 'I left my trunk at the

station. Here's the check. Can you send for it?' she asked.

"Her trunk--she wanted me to send for her trunk! Oh, yes--I see your

smile, your 'lucky man!' Only, you see, I didn't love her in that way.

I knew she couldn't come to my house without running a big risk of

discovery, and my tenderness for her, my impulse to shield her, was

stronger, even then, than vanity or desire. Judged from the point of

view of those emotions I fell terribly short of my part. I hadn't any

of the proper feelings. Such an act of romantic folly was so unlike her

that it almost irritated me, and I found myself desperately wondering

how I could get her to reconsider her plan without--well, without

seeming to want her to.

"It's not the way a novel hero feels; it's probably not the way a man in

real life ought to have felt. But it's the way I felt--and she saw it.

"She put her hands on my shoulders and looked at me with deep, deep

eyes. 'Then you didn't expect me to stay?' she asked.

"I caught her hands and pressed them to me, stammering out that I hadn't

dared to dream....

"'You thought I'd come--just for an hour?'

"'How could I dare think more? I adore you, you know, for what

you've done! But it would be known if you--if you stayed on. My

servants--everybody about here knows you. I've no right to expose you to

the risk.' She made no answer, and I went on tenderly: 'Give me, if you

will, the next few hours: there's a train that will get you to town by

midnight. And then we'll arrange something--in town--where it's safer

for you--more easily managed.... It's beautiful, it's heavenly of you

to have come; but I love you too much--I must take care of you and think

for you--'

"I don't suppose it ever took me so long to say so few words, and

though they were profoundly sincere they sounded unutterably shallow,

irrelevant and grotesque. She made no effort to help me out, but sat

silent, listening, with her meditative smile. 'It's my duty, dearest, as

a man,' I rambled on. The more I love you the more I'm bound--'

"'Yes; but you don't understand,' she interrupted.

"She rose as she spoke, and I got up also, and we stood and looked at

each other.

"'I haven't come for a night; if you want me I've come for always,' she

said.

"Here again, if I give you an honest account of my feelings I shall

write myself down as the poor-spirited creature I suppose I am. There

wasn't, I swear, at the moment, a grain of selfishness, of personal

reluctance, in my feeling. I worshipped every hair of her head--when we

were together I was happy, when I was away from her something was gone

from every good thing; but I had always looked on our love for each

other, our possible relation to each other, as such situations are

looked on in what is called society. I had supposed her, for all her

freedom and originality, to be just as tacitly subservient to that view

as I was: ready to take what she wanted on the terms on which society

concedes such taking, and to pay for it by the usual restrictions,

concealments and hypocrisies. In short, I supposed that she would 'play

the game'--look out for her own safety, and expect me to look out for

it. It sounds cheap enough, put that way--but it's the rule we live

under, all of us. And the amazement of finding her suddenly outside of

it, oblivious of it, unconscious of it, left me, for an awful minute,

stammering at her like a graceless dolt.... Perhaps it wasn't even a

minute; but in it she had gone the whole round of my thoughts.

"'It's raining,' she said, very low. 'I suppose you can telephone for a

trap?'

"There was no irony or resentment in her voice. She walked slowly across

the room and paused before the Brangwyn etching over there. 'That's a

good impression. _Will_ you telephone, please?' she repeated.

"I found my voice again, and with it the power of movement. I followed

her and dropped at her feet. 'You can't go like this!' I cried.

"She looked down on me from heights and heights. 'I can't stay like

this,' she answered.

"I stood up and we faced each other like antagonists. 'You don't know,'

I accused her passionately, 'in the least what you're asking me to ask

of you!'

"'Yes, I do: _everything_,' she breathed.

"'And it's got to be that or nothing?'

"'Oh, on both sides,' she reminded me.

"'_Not_ on both sides. It's not fair. That's why--'

"'Why you won't?'

"'Why I cannot--may not!'

"'Why you'll take a night and not a life?'

"The taunt, for a woman usually so sure of her aim, fell so short of

the mark that its only effect was to increase my conviction of her

helplessness. The very intensity of my longing for her made me tremble

where she was fearless. I had to protect her first, and think of my own

attitude afterward.

"She was too discerning not to see this too. Her face softened, grew

inexpressibly appealing, and she dropped again into that chair you're

in, leaned forward, and looked up with her grave smile.

"'You think I'm beside myself--raving? (You're not thinking of yourself,

I know.) I'm not: I never was saner. Since I've known you I've often

thought this might happen. This thing between us isn't an ordinary

thing. If it had been we shouldn't, all these months, have drifted. We

should have wanted to skip to the last page--and then throw down the

book. We shouldn't have felt we could _trust_ the future as we did. We

were in no hurry because we knew we shouldn't get tired; and when two

people feel that about each other they must live together--or part. I

don't see what else they can do. A little trip along the coast won't

answer. It's the high seas--or else being tied up to Lethe wharf. And

I'm for the high seas, my dear!'

"Think of sitting here--here, in this room, in this chair--and listening

to that, and seeing the tight on her hair, and hearing the sound of her

voice! I don't suppose there ever was a scene just like it....

"She was astounding--inexhaustible; through all my anguish of resistance

I found a kind of fierce joy in following her. It was lucidity at white

heat: the last sublimation of passion. She might have been an angel

arguing a point in the empyrean if she hadn't been, so completely, a

woman pleading for her life....

"Her life: that was the thing at stake! She couldn't do with less of it

than she was capable of; and a woman's life is inextricably part of the

man's she cares for.

"That was why, she argued, she couldn't accept the usual solution:

couldn't enter into the only relation that society tolerates between

people situated like ourselves. Yes: she knew all the arguments on

_that_ side: didn't I suppose she'd been over them and over them? She

knew (for hadn't she often said it of others?) what is said of the woman

who, by throwing in her lot with her lover's, binds him to a lifelong

duty which has the irksomeness without the dignity of marriage. Oh,

she could talk on that side with the best of them: only she asked me to

consider the other--the side of the man and woman who love each other

deeply and completely enough to want their lives enlarged, and not

diminished, by their love. What, in such a case--she reasoned--must be

the inevitable effect of concealing, denying, disowning, the central

fact, the motive power of one's existence? She asked me to picture the

course of such a love: first working as a fever in the blood, distorting

and deflecting everything, making all other interests insipid, all other

duties irksome, and then, as the acknowledged claims of life regained

their hold, gradually dying--the poor starved passion!--for want of the

wholesome necessary food of common living and doing, yet leaving life

impoverished by the loss of all it might have been.

"'I'm not talking, dear--' I see her now, leaning toward me with shining

eyes: 'I'm not talking of the people who haven't enough to fill their

days, and to whom a little mystery, a little manoeuvring, gives an

illusion of importance that they can't afford to miss; I'm talking of

you and me, with all our tastes and curiosities and activities; and I

ask you what our love would become if we had to keep it apart from our

lives, like a pretty useless animal that we went to peep at and feed

with sweetmeats through its cage?'

"I won't, my dear fellow, go into the other side of our strange duel:

the arguments I used were those that most men in my situation would

have felt bound to use, and that most women in Paulina's accept

instinctively, without even formulating them. The exceptionalness, the

significance, of the case lay wholly in the fact that she had formulated

them all and then rejected them....

"There was one point I didn't, of course, touch on; and that was the

popular conviction (which I confess I shared) that when a man and a

woman agree to defy the world together the man really sacrifices much

more than the woman. I was not even conscious of thinking of this at the

time, though it may have lurked somewhere in the shadow of my scruples

for her; but she dragged it out into the daylight and held me face to

face with it.

"'Remember, I'm not attempting to lay down any general rule,' she

insisted; 'I'm not theorizing about Man and Woman, I'm talking about you

and me. How do I know what's best for the woman in the next house? Very

likely she'll bolt when it would have been better for her to stay at

home. And it's the same with the man: he'll probably do the wrong thing.

It's generally the weak heads that commit follies, when it's the strong

ones that ought to: and my point is that you and I are both strong

enough to behave like fools if we want to....

"'Take your own case first--because, in spite of the sentimentalists,

it's the man who stands to lose most. You'll have to give up the Iron

Works: which you don't much care about--because it won't be particularly

agreeable for us to live in New York: which you don't care much about

either. But you won't be sacrificing what is called "a career." You made

up your mind long ago that your best chance of self-development, and

consequently of general usefulness, lay in thinking rather than doing;

and, when we first met, you were already planning to sell out your

business, and travel and write. Well! Those ambitions are of a kind

that won't be harmed by your dropping out of your social setting. On

the contrary, such work as you want to do ought to gain by it,

because you'll be brought nearer to life-as-it-is, in contrast to

life-as-a-visiting-list....'

"She threw back her head with a sudden laugh. 'And the joy of not having

any more visits to make! I wonder if you've ever thought of _that?_ Just

at first, I mean; for society's getting so deplorably lax that, little

by little, it will edge up to us--you'll see! I don't want to idealize

the situation, dearest, and I won't conceal from you that in time we

shall be called on. But, oh, the fun we shall have had in the interval!

And then, for the first time we shall be able to dictate our own terms,

one of which will be that no bores need apply. Think of being cured of

all one's chronic bores! We shall feel as jolly as people do after a

successful operation.'

"I don't know why this nonsense sticks in my mind when some of the

graver things we said are less distinct. Perhaps it's because of a

certain iridescent quality of feeling that made her gaiety seem like

sunshine through a shower....

"'You ask me to think of myself?' she went on. 'But the beauty of our

being together will be that, for the first time, I shall dare to! Now

I have to think of all the tedious trifles I can pack the days with,

because I'm afraid--I'm afraid--to hear the voice of the real me, down

below, in the windowless underground hole where I keep her....

"'Remember again, please, it's not Woman, it's Paulina Trant,

I'm talking of. The woman in the next house may have all sorts of

reasons--honest reasons--for staying there. There may be some one

there who needs her badly: for whom the light would go out if she went.

Whereas to Philip I've been simply--well, what New York was before he

decided to travel: the most important thing in life till he made up his

mind to leave it; and now merely the starting-place of several lines of

steamers. Oh, I didn't have to love you to know that! I only had to live

with _him_.... If he lost his eye-glasses he'd think it was the fault of

the eye-glasses; he'd really feel that the eyeglasses had been careless.

And he'd be convinced that no others would suit him quite as well.

But at the optician's he'd probably be told that he needed something a

little different, and after that he'd feel that the old eye-glasses had

never suited him at all, and that _that_ was their fault too....'

"At one moment--but I don't recall when--I remember she stood up with

one of her quick movements, and came toward me, holding out her arms.

'Oh, my dear, I'm pleading for my life; do you suppose I shall ever want

for arguments?' she cried....

"After that, for a bit, nothing much remains with me except a sense of

darkness and of conflict. The one spot of daylight in my whirling brain

was the conviction that I couldn't--whatever happened--profit by the

sudden impulse she had acted on, and allow her to take, in a moment of

passion, a decision that was to shape her whole life. I couldn't so

much as lift my little finger to keep her with me then, unless I were

prepared to accept for her as well as for myself the full consequences

of the future she had planned for us....

"Well--there's the point: I wasn't. I felt in her--poor fatuous idiot

that I was!--that lack of objective imagination which had always seemed

to me to account, at least in part, for many of the so-called heroic

qualities in women. When their feelings are involved they simply can't

look ahead. Her unfaltering logic notwithstanding, I felt this about

Paulina as I listened. She had a specious air of knowing where she was

going, but she didn't. She seemed the genius of logic and understanding,

but the demon of illusion spoke through her lips....

"I said just now that I hadn't, at the outset, given my own side of the

case a thought. It would have been truer to say that I hadn't given it a

_separate_ thought. But I couldn't think of her without seeing myself as

a factor--the chief factor--in her problem, and without recognizing that

whatever the experiment made of me, that it must fatally, in the end,

make of her. If I couldn't carry the thing through she must break

down with me: we should have to throw our separate selves into

the melting-pot of this mad adventure, and be 'one' in a terrible

indissoluble completeness of which marriage is only an imperfect

counterpart....

"There could be no better proof of her extraordinary power over me, and

of the way she had managed to clear the air of sentimental illusion,

than the fact that I presently found myself putting this before her with

a merciless precision of touch.

"'If we love each other enough to do a thing like this, we must love

each other enough to see just what it is we're going to do.'

"So I invited her to the dissecting-table, and I see now the fearless

eye with which she approached the cadaver. 'For that's what it is, you

know,' she flashed out at me, at the end of my long demonstration. 'It's

a dead body, like all the instances and examples and hypothetical cases

that ever were! What do you expect to learn from that? The first great

anatomist was the man who stuck his knife in a heart that was beating;

and the only way to find out what doing a thing will be like is to do

it!'

"She looked away from me suddenly, as if she were fixing her eyes on

some vision on the outer rim of consciousness. 'No: there's one other

way,' she exclaimed; 'and that is, _not_ to do it! To abstain and

refrain; and then see what we become, or what we don't become, in

the long run, and to draw our inferences. That's the game that almost

everybody about us is playing, I suppose; there's hardly one of the dull

people one meets at dinner who hasn't had, just once, the chance of a

berth on a ship that was off for the Happy Isles, and hasn't refused it

for fear of sticking on a sand-bank!

"'I'm doing my best, you know,' she continued, 'to see the sequel as

you see it, as you believe it's your duty to me to see it. I know the

instances you're thinking of: the listless couples wearing out their

lives in shabby watering places, and hanging on the favour of hotel

acquaintances; or the proud quarrelling wretches shut up alone in a fine

house because they're too good for the only society they can get, and

trying to cheat their boredom by squabbling with their tradesmen and

spying on their servants. No doubt there are such cases; but I don't

recognize either of us in those dismal figures. Why, to do it would be

to admit that our life, yours and mine, is in the people about us

and not in ourselves; that we're parasites and not self-sustaining

creatures; and that the lives we're leading now are so brilliant, full

and satisfying that what we should have to give up would surpass even

the blessedness of being together!'

"At that stage, I confess, the solid ground of my resistance began to

give way under me. It was not that my convictions were shaken, but that

she had swept me into a world whose laws were different, where one could

reach out in directions that the slave of gravity hasn't pictured. But

at the same time my opposition hardened from reason into instinct. I

knew it was her voice, and not her logic, that was unsettling me. I knew

that if she'd written out her thesis and sent it me by post I should

have made short work of it; and again the part of me which I called

by all the finest names: my chivalry, my unselfishness, my superior

masculine experience, cried out with one voice: 'You can't let a woman

use her graces to her own undoing--you can't, for her own sake, let her

eyes convince you when her reasons don't!'

"And then, abruptly, and for the first time, a doubt entered me: a

doubt of her perfect moral honesty. I don't know how else to describe

my feeling that she wasn't playing fair, that in coming to my house, in

throwing herself at my head (I called things by their names), she

had perhaps not so much obeyed an irresistible impulse as deeply,

deliberately reckoned on the dissolvent effect of her generosity, her

rashness and her beauty....

"From the moment that this mean doubt raised its head in me I was once

more the creature of all the conventional scruples: I was repeating,

before the looking-glass of my self-consciousness, all the stereotyped

gestures of the 'man of honour.'... Oh, the sorry figure I must have

cut! You'll understand my dropping the curtain on it as quickly as I

can....

"Yet I remember, as I made my point, being struck by its impressiveness.

I was suffering and enjoying my own suffering. I told her that, whatever

step we decided to take, I owed it to her to insist on its being taken

soberly, deliberately--

"('No: it's "advisedly," isn't it? Oh, I was thinking of the Marriage

Service,' she interposed with a faint laugh.)

"--that if I accepted, there, on the spot, her headlong beautiful gift

of herself, I should feel I had taken an unfair advantage of her, an

advantage which she would be justified in reproaching me with afterward;

that I was not afraid to tell her this because she was intelligent

enough to know that my scruples were the surest proof of the quality of

my love; that I refused to owe my happiness to an unconsidered impulse;

that we must see each other again, in her own house, in less agitating

circumstances, when she had had time to reflect on my words, to study

her heart and look into the future....

"The factitious exhilaration produced by uttering these beautiful

sentiments did not last very long, as you may imagine. It fell, little

by little, under her quiet gaze, a gaze in which there was neither

contempt nor irony nor wounded pride, but only a tender wistfulness of

interrogation; and I think the acutest point in my suffering was reached

when she said, as I ended: 'Oh; yes, of course I understand.'

"'If only you hadn't come to me here!' I blurted out in the torture of

my soul.

"She was on the threshold when I said it, and she turned and laid her

hand gently on mine. 'There was no other way,' she said; and at the

moment it seemed to me like some hackneyed phrase in a novel that she

had used without any sense of its meaning.

"I don't remember what I answered or what more we either of us said. At

the end a desperate longing to take her in my arms and keep her with me

swept aside everything else, and I went up to her, pleading, stammering,

urging I don't know what.... But she held me back with a quiet look,

and went. I had ordered the carriage, as she asked me to; and my last

definite recollection is of watching her drive off in the rain....

"I had her promise that she would see me, two days later, at her house

in town, and that we should then have what I called 'a decisive talk';

but I don't think that even at the moment I was the dupe of my phrase. I

knew, and she knew, that the end had come...."

V

"It was about that time (Merrick went on after a long pause) that I

definitely decided not to sell the Works, but to stick to my job and

conform my life to it.

"I can't describe to you the rage of conformity that possessed me.

Poetry, ideas--all the picture-making processes stopped. A kind of dull

self-discipline seemed to me the only exercise worthy of a reflecting

mind. I _had_ to justify my great refusal, and I tried to do it by

plunging myself up to the eyes into the very conditions I had been

instinctively struggling to get away from. The only possible consolation

would have been to find in a life of business routine and social

submission such moral compensations as may reward the citizen if they

fail the man; but to attain to these I should have had to accept the

old delusion that the social and the individual man are two. Now, on

the contrary, I found soon enough that I couldn't get one part of my

machinery to work effectively while another wanted feeding: and that in

rejecting what had seemed to me a negation of action I had made all my

action negative.

"The best solution, of course, would have been to fall in love with

another woman; but it was long before I could bring myself to wish that

this might happen to me.... Then, at length, I suddenly and violently

desired it; and as such impulses are seldom without some kind of

imperfect issue I contrived, a year or two later, to work myself up into

the wished-for state.... She was a woman in society, and with all

the awe of that institution that Paulina lacked. Our relation was

consequently one of those unavowed affairs in which triviality is the

only alternative to tragedy. Luckily we had, on both sides, risked only

as much as prudent people stake in a drawingroom game; and when the

match was over I take it that we came out fairly even.

"My gain, at all events, was of an unexpected kind. The adventure

had served only to make me understand Paulina's abhorrence of such

experiments, and at every turn of the slight intrigue I had felt how

exasperating and belittling such a relation was bound to be between two

people who, had they been free, would have mated openly. And so from a

brief phase of imperfect forgetting I was driven back to a deeper and

more understanding remembrance....

"This second incarnation of Paulina was one of the strangest episodes

of the whole strange experience. Things she had said during our

extraordinary talk, things I had hardly heard at the time, came back to

me with singular vividness and a fuller meaning. I hadn't any longer

the cold consolation of believing in my own perspicacity: I saw that her

insight had been deeper and keener than mine.

"I remember, in particular, starting up in bed one sleepless night as

there flashed into my head the meaning of her last words: 'There was

no other way'; the phrase I had half-smiled at at the time, as a

parrot-like echo of the novel-heroine's stock farewell. I had never, up

to that moment, wholly understood why Paulina had come to my house that

night. I had never been able to make that particular act--which could

hardly, in the light of her subsequent conduct, be dismissed as a blind

surge of passion--square with my conception of her character. She was

at once the most spontaneous and the steadiest-minded woman I had

ever known, and the last to wish to owe any advantage to surprise, to

unpreparedness, to any play on the spring of sex. The better I came,

retrospectively, to know her, the more sure I was of this, and the less

intelligible her act appeared. And then, suddenly, after a night of

hungry restless thinking, the flash of enlightenment came. She had come

to my house, had brought her trunk with her, had thrown herself at my

head with all possible violence and publicity, in order to give me a

pretext, a loophole, an honourable excuse, for doing and saying--why,

precisely what I had said and done!

"As the idea came to me it was as if some ironic hand had touched an

electric button, and all my fatuous phrases had leapt out on me in fire.

"Of course she had known all along just the kind of thing I should

say if I didn't at once open my arms to her; and to save my pride, my

dignity, my conception of the figure I was cutting in her eyes, she had

recklessly and magnificently provided me with the decentest pretext a

man could have for doing a pusillanimous thing....

"With that discovery the whole case took a different aspect. It hurt

less to think of Paulina--and yet it hurt more. The tinge of bitterness,

of doubt, in my thoughts of her had had a tonic quality. It was harder

to go on persuading myself that I had done right as, bit by bit, my

theories crumbled under the test of time. Yet, after all, as she herself

had said, one could judge of results only in the long run....

"The Trants stayed away for two years; and about a year after they got

back, you may remember, Trant was killed in a railway accident. You know

Fate's way of untying a knot after everybody has given up tugging at it!

"Well--there I was, completely justified: all my weaknesses turned into

merits! I had 'saved' a weak woman from herself, I had kept her to the

path of duty, I had spared her the humiliation of scandal and the misery

of self-reproach; and now I had only to put out my hand and take my

reward.

"I had avoided Paulina since her return, and she had made no effort to

see me. But after Trant's death I wrote her a few lines, to which she

sent a friendly answer; and when a decent interval had elapsed, and I

asked if I might call on her, she answered at once that she would see

me.

"I went to her house with the fixed intention of asking her to marry

me--and I left it without having done so. Why? I don't know that I can

tell you. Perhaps you would have had to sit there opposite her, knowing

what I did and feeling as I did, to understand why. She was kind, she

was compassionate--I could see she didn't want to make it hard for me.

Perhaps she even wanted to make it easy. But there, between us, was the

memory of the gesture I hadn't made, forever parodying the one I was

attempting! There wasn't a word I could think of that hadn't an echo in

it of words of hers I had been deaf to; there wasn't an appeal I could

make that didn't mock the appeal I had rejected. I sat there and talked

of her husband's death, of her plans, of my sympathy; and I knew she

understood; and knowing that, in a way, made it harder.... The door-bell

rang and the footman came in to ask if she would receive other visitors.

She looked at me a moment and said 'Yes,' and I got up and shook hands

and went away.

"A few days later she sailed for Europe, and the next time we met she

had married Reardon...."