VIII
A STIRRING WEEK
Ay! we would each fain drive
At random, and not steer by rule.
Weakness! and worse, weakness bestows in vain.
Winds from our side the unsuiting consort rive.
We rush by coasts where we had lief remain;
Man cannot, though he would, live chance's fool.
Even so we leave behind,
As, charter'd by some unknown Powers,
We stem across the sea of life by night.
The joys which were not for our use design'd;
The friends to whom we had no natural right,
The homes that were not destined to be ours.
Matthew Arnold.
It goes without saying that Mr. Wheeler's attitude, and my being practically forbidden the house at Weybridge, strengthened and sharpened my interest in Sylvia. Nothing else so fans the flame of a young man's fancy as being forbidden all access to its object. Accordingly, in the weeks which followed that Sunday at Weybridge, I began an ardent correspondence with Sylvia, after inducing her to arrange to call for letters at a certain newspaper shop not far from the station.
It was a curious correspondence in many ways. Some of my long, wordy epistles were indited from the reporters' room at the Daily Gazette office, in the midst of noisy talk and the hurried production of "copy." Others, again, were produced, long after—for my health's sake—I should have been in bed; and these were written on a corner of my little chest of drawers in the Bloomsbury lodging-house. I was a great reader of the poet Swinburne at the time, and I doubt not my muse was sufficiently passionate seeming. But, though I believe my phrases of endearment were alliteratively emphatic, and even, as I afterwards learned, somewhat alarming to their recipient, yet the real mainspring of my eloquence was the difference between our respective views of life, Sylvia's and mine.
In short, before very long my letters resolved themselves into fiery and vehement denunciation of Sylvia's particular and chosen metier in religion, and equally vehement special pleading on behalf of the claims of humanity and social reform, as I saw them. I find the thing provocative of smiles now, but I was terribly in earnest then, or thought so, and had realized nothing of the absolute futility of pitting temperament against temperament, reason against conviction, argument against emotional belief.