He asked for information; in all honesty he simply wanted to be told. “I just don’t know how to go about it,” he added; “I don’t know how to even start; that’s the trouble. What had I better do first?”
Muriel stared at him; for in truth, she found herself at a loss. Faced with a request for grovelling details of the lofty but somewhat indefinite processes she had sketched, she was as completely a vacancy as could be found in all the cultural desert about her.
“Really!” she said. “If you don’t know such things for yourself, I don’t believe you could ever find out from anybody else!”
In this almost epigrammatic manner she concealed from him—and almost from herself—that she had no instructions to give him; nor was she aware that she had employed an instinctive device of no great novelty. Self-protection inspires it wherever superiority must be preserved; it has high official and military usages, but is most frequently in operation upon the icier intellectual summits. Yet, like a sword with a poisonous hilt, it always avenges its victim, and he who employs it will be irritable for some time afterward—he is really irritated with himself, but naturally prefers to think the irritation is with the stupidity that stumped him.
Thus Muriel departed abruptly, clashing the gate for all her expression of farewell, and left startled young Mr. Mears standing there, a figure of obvious pathos. She went indoors, and, having ascended to her own room, presently sat down and engaged herself with writing materials. Little shadows of despondency played upon her charming forehead as she wrote:
“Life is so terrible!
Far off—far, far—oh, infinitely distant—oh,
Where far-flung fleets and argosies
Of nobler thoughts abound
Than those I find around me