Maurice promised that he would, and our talk turned to the Duchesse—he had seen her at a cross country station as he came up, and she would be back in Paris the following week—This thought gave me comfort. Everyone would be back by the fifteenth of October he assured me, and then we could all amuse ourselves again—.
"You will be quite well enough to dine out, Nicholas—Or if not you must move to the Ritz with me, so that you at least have entertainment on the spot, Mon cher!"
We spoke then of the book—Furniture was a really refined and interesting subject for me to be delving into. Maurice longed to read the proofs, he averred.
When he had left me, I lay back in my chair and asked myself what had happened to me?—that Maurice and all that lot seemed such miles and miles away from me—as miles and miles as they would have seemed in their triviality, when we used to discuss important questions in "Pop" at Eton.
How I must have sunk in the years which followed those dear old days, ever even to have found divertisement among the people like Maurice and the fluffies. Surely even a one-eyed and one-legged man ought to be able to do something for his country politically, it suddenly seemed to me—and what a glorious picture to gaze at!—If I could some day go into Parliament, and have Alathea beside me, to give me inspiration and help me to the best in myself. How her poise would tell in English political society! How her brain and her power of exercising her critical faculties! Apart from the fact that I love every inch of her wisp of a body—What an asset that mind would be to any man!—And I dreamed and dreamed in the firelight—things all filled with sentiment and exaltation, which of course no fellow could ever say aloud, or let anyone know of—A journal is certainly an immense comfort, and I do not believe I could have gone through this hideous year of my life without it.
How I would love to have Alathea for my wife—and have children—It can't be possible that I have written that! I loathe children in the abstract—they bore me to death—Even Solonge de Clerté's two entertaining angels—but to have a son—with Alathea's eyes——God! how the thought makes me feel!—How I would like to sit and talk with her of how we should bring him up—I reached out my hand and picked up a volume of Charles Lamb and read "Dream Children"—and as I finished I felt that idiotic choky sensation which I have only begun to know since something in me has been awakened by Alathea—or since my nerves have been on the rack—I don't remember ever feeling much touched, or weak, or silly, before the war—.
And now what have I to face—?
A will, stronger, or as strong as my own—A prejudice of the deepest which I cannot explain away—A knowledge that I have no power to retain the thing I love—No guerdon to hold out to her mentally or physically—Nothing but the material thing of money—which because of her great unselfishness and desire to benefit her loved ones, she might be forced to consider. My only possibility of obtaining her at all is to buy her with money. And when once bought,—when I had her here in my house,—would I have the strength to resist the temptation to take advantage of the situation?—Could I go on day after day never touching her,—never having any joys?—until the greatness of my love somehow melted her dislike and contempt of me—?
I wish to God I knew.
She will never marry me unless I give my word of honour that the thing will only be an empty ceremony—of that I feel sure even if circumstances aid me to force her into doing this much. And then one has to keep one's word of honour. And might not that be a greater hell than I am now in of suffering?