"No one else has ever said that to me. I said it to myself sometimes—but most of the time I honestly thought that I should be a fool to chuck away what Clarence offered me. And when he had his accident, in the country, I knew nothing about it for a week after it had happened—naturally, no one thought of letting me know. I imagined all sorts of things—that he'd chucked me, you know. And I was angry and furious and disappointed—in spite of everything. But my aunt read about the accident in some paper or other, and wrote to me. And afterwards Clarence's mother wrote."
"She didn't ask you, then, to give him up?"
"She didn't say anything about my being engaged to him at all. But when he was better, still in the nursing-home, he wrote himself, and told me that most likely he would be half-paralysed for the rest of his life. They really thought he would be, then, you know. And he asked me if I thought I could bear it. That was when I first began to realise my own inadequacy. You see, all the time I'd been thinking of him, and how young he was—how unlike what I'd sometimes fancied. But when he wrote like that, I knew that I couldn't even write the only sort of letter that would have been any good. I was worse than useless. I wrote the sort of answer that really meant nothing at all—though I put all the sort of affectionate expressions that he liked, and anything and everything I could think of—but I didn't answer one word about our engagement. I couldn't. I wrote to him every day, and all the while I was trying to gain time, to think it all out.
"You've no idea how difficult it is sometimes just to get time and a place for thinking. There was my work all day, and then I used to fancy I'd have the evening—but it was so cold in my room, and I found that I was only thinking about that all the time, and how I could keep my hands warm. And in bed—one always imagines one can do all one's thinking in bed. But one can't! Things look quite different in the night, somehow much more important—I can't explain; and then all the shorthand outlines one had been making all day on the blackboard seemed to come into the darkness. I'm making it all sound muddled, I know—but that's what it was. Just a muddle, and all the relative values of things seeming to turn upside down." She paused.
"I understand," said Julian.
"In the end, Clarence wrote again, and said he must release me from the engagement; he couldn't ask me to marry a man who would most likely never be able to walk again. And I thought, and thought—till I was nearly frantic. You see, in a way, it would be the impulse of every woman to feel that she was all the more bound in honour to stick to a man because of that—of course, I'm not speaking about those people who love one another, that's different. But it kept coming over me like a wave—how unthinkable it would be to refuse to marry a man after all, after one had promised, just when he'd had that appalling knock from Fate and everything that made his life worth living had been taken away. As though one could never do enough to make up for it all.... But in the end it was that which decided me. You see, I knew that I could never make up—and not only that, but that I might make it far, far worse for him. It seemed to me that only a very great love could have been adequate. And I not only didn't love him, but I knew myself—I'm not patient, I'm not an unselfish woman. Heaven only knows what I should be, married to an invalid, to an unfortunate boy who cared for me, and who would be utterly dependent on me for all the things that matter most. And I could have given him nothing—I should have been worse than useless to him. There was nothing real between us—only just his infatuation—and I knew that couldn't last. I believed then, when I thought of him as a cripple, that if I'd married Clarence, he would have come to hate me. Before he was hurt, I'd meant to risk it and to try and be a good wife to him, though even then I knew I was cheating—taking all he could give me, and bringing so little. But afterwards, it seemed to me that it would be a worse cheating to try and meet a tremendous demand like that with just nothing at all. So I wrote and tried to explain it to him, and tell him why I wouldn't say I'd marry him in spite of it all."
For the last time, they reached the end of the sea-wall and turned, once more facing the blustering wind. In the rapidly gathering twilight Julian could only see that her face was very pale.
"Well," she said, with a very small, rather tired laugh, "he didn't become a cripple for life, and he married somebody else, who was suitable. And I sometimes wonder whether I was a fool."
"I don't think you wonder really," said Sir Julian steadily. "You know as well as I do that you had been led into a false position, and that you had the courage to act up to your own inmost convictions, instead of making bad worse by yielding to the impulse of a generous self-sacrifice that is bound to spell disaster unless there is the capability of sustained effort to back it. Lacking that capability, as you were aware of lacking it, you were brave enough to set obvious sentiment at defiance."
"Oh!" cried Miss Marchrose, in an odd voice between laughter and sadness, "I have never before heard the case for the defence stated like that! Thank you, Sir Julian."