‘I have not been fortunate,’ he answered; ‘I have been so far from fortunate that’ I have been writing like an untrained schoolboy. I could have done better before I was fifteen.’
‘But why is that? she asked. ‘Your mind should only just now be ripening. Your time is all your own.’
‘There is not one minute of my time my own,’ he answered in a smouldering wrathfulness.
‘Why not?’ she questioned.
‘Come,’ said Paul, ‘isn’t that just a little disingenuous? Don’t you know why not? Here am I,’ he went on, ‘as I do most solemnly believe, as madly in love as ever man was in the history of the world; petted, encouraged, and caressed, and ignored, and repulsed, until in the insane weakness of my own nature I have let all manhood ooze out of me. I am unlike Hamlet, my dear Gertrude. I am both to be fretted and played upon.’
‘Played upon?’ she said reproachfully.
‘Played upon,’ he repeated with what sounded like a weighty deliberation.
Gertrude began to cry, and set a dainty handkerchief to her eyes, but she said nothing, and Paul’s only resource was to go on talking, to keep himself in sight of his own injuries.
‘You and I made a bargain, Gertrude: we were to be friends, and no more than friends. You have known all along how much it cost me to keep within those limits; and have you helped me? I put that to your conscience.’
‘Helped you?’ she asked, pausing once more in her walk, and looking up at him in an innocent bewilderment.