“And then, abruptly, and for the first time, a doubt entered me: a doubt of her perfect moral honesty. I don’t know how else to describe my feeling that she wasn’t playing fair, that in coming to my house, in throwing herself at my head (I called things by their names), she had perhaps not so much obeyed an irresistible impulse as deeply, deliberately reckoned on the dissolvent effect of her generosity, her rashness and her beauty....
“From the moment that this mean doubt raised its head in me I was once more the creature of all the conventional scruples: I was repeating, before the looking-glass of my self-consciousness, all the stereotyped gestures of the ‘man of honour.’... Oh, the sorry figure I must have cut! You’ll understand my dropping the curtain on it as quickly as I can....
“Yet I remember, as I made my point, being struck by its impressiveness. I was suffering and enjoying my own suffering. I told her that, whatever step we decided to take, I owed it to her to insist on its being taken soberly, deliberately—
“(‘No: it’s “advisedly,” isn’t it? Oh, I was thinking of the Marriage Service,’ she interposed with a faint laugh.)
“—that if I accepted, there, on the spot, her headlong beautiful gift of herself, I should feel I had taken an unfair advantage of her, an advantage which she would be justified in reproaching me with afterward; that I was not afraid to tell her this because she was intelligent enough to know that my scruples were the surest proof of the quality of my love; that I refused to owe my happiness to an unconsidered impulse; that we must see each other again, in her own house, in less agitating circumstances, when she had had time to reflect on my words, to study her heart and look into the future....
“The factitious exhilaration produced by uttering these beautiful sentiments did not last very long, as you may imagine. It fell, little by little, under her quiet gaze, a gaze in which there was neither contempt nor irony nor wounded pride, but only a tender wistfulness of interrogation; and I think the acutest point in my suffering was reached when she said, as I ended: ‘Oh; yes, of course I understand.’
“‘If only you hadn’t come to me here!’ I blurted out in the torture of my soul.
“She was on the threshold when I said it, and she turned and laid her hand gently on mine. ‘There was no other way,’ she said; and at the moment it seemed to me like some hackneyed phrase in a novel that she had used without any sense of its meaning.
“I don’t remember what I answered or what more we either of us said. At the end a desperate longing to take her in my arms and keep her with me swept aside everything else, and I went up to her, pleading, stammering, urging I don’t know what.... But she held me back with a quiet look, and went. I had ordered the carriage, as she asked me to; and my last definite recollection is of watching her drive off in the rain....
“I had her promise that she would see me, two days later, at her house in town, and that we should then have what I called ‘a decisive talk’; but I don’t think that even at the moment I was the dupe of my phrase. I knew, and she knew, that the end had come....”