“‘I was with him.’
“‘You were with him?’
“I shall never forget Meriton’s look. I believe I had meant to explain, to accuse myself, to shout out my agony of soul; but I saw the uselessness of it. A door had been shut between us. Neither of us spoke another word. He was very kind to me on the way home; he looked after me in a motherly way that was a good deal harder to stand than his open contempt. I saw the man was honestly trying to pity me; but it was no good—he simply couldn’t.”
Mr. Carstyle rose slowly, with a certain stiffness.
“Shall we turn toward home? Perhaps I’m keeping you.”
They walked on a few steps in silence; then he spoke again.
“That business altered my whole life. Of course I oughtn’t to have allowed it to—that was another form of cowardice. But I saw myself only with Meriton’s eyes—it is one of the worst miseries of youth that one is always trying to be somebody else. I had meant to be a Meriton—I saw I’d better go home and study law....
“It’s a childish fancy, a survival of the primitive savage, if you like; but from that hour to this I’ve hankered day and night for a chance to retrieve myself, to set myself right with the man I meant to be. I want to prove to that man that it was all an accident—an unaccountable deviation from my normal instincts; that having once been a coward doesn’t mean that a man’s cowardly... and I can’t, I can’t!”
Mr. Carstyle’s tone had passed insensibly from agitation to irony. He had got back to his usual objective stand-point.
“Why, I’m a perfect olive-branch,” he concluded, with his dry indulgent laugh; “the very babies stop crying at my approach—I carry a sort of millennium about with me—I’d make my fortune as an agent of the Peace Society. I shall go to the grave leaving that other man unconvinced!”