One Man in His Time

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

"I am fond of her. I shall always be fond of her," he said. "Does it make any difference to you, my dear?"

Yes, he had mistaken her meaning. He was judging her in the dim light of an immemorial tradition; and he had seen in her anxious probing for truth merely a personal jealousy. Women were like that, he would have said, applying, in accordance with his mental custom, the general law to the particular instance. After all, where could they meet? They were as far divided in their outlook on life as if they had inhabited different spiritual hemispheres. A curiosity seized her to know what was in his mind, to sound the depths of that unfathomable reserve.

"That is over so completely that I thought it would make no difference to you," he added almost reproachfully, as if she, not he, were to be blamed for dragging a disagreeable subject into the light.

Fear stabbed Corinna's heart like a knife. "But she still loves you!" she cried sharply.

He flinched from the sharpness of her tone. "I am sorry," he said again; but the words glided, with a perfunctory grace, on the surface of emotion. Suppose that what he said was true, she told herself; suppose that it was really "over"; suppose that she also recognized only the egoist's view of duty—of the paramount duty to one's own inclinations; suppose—"Oh, am I so different from him?" she thought, "why cannot I also mistake the urging of desire for the command of conscience—or at least call it that in my mind?" For a minute she struggled desperately with the temptation; and in that minute it seemed to her that the face of Alice Rokeby, with its look of wistful expectancy, of hungry yearning, drifted past her in the twilight.

"But is it obliged to be over?" she asked aloud. "I could never care as she does. I have always been like that, and I can't change. I have always been able to feel just so much and no more—to give just so much and no more."

He looked at her attentively, a little troubled, she could see, but not deeply hurt, not hurt enough to break down the wall which protected the secret—or was it the emptiness?—of his nature.

"Has the knowledge of my—my old friendship for Mrs. Rokeby come between us?" he asked slowly and earnestly.

While he spoke it seemed to her that all that had been obscure in her view of him rolled away like the mist in the garden, leaving the structure of his being bare and stark to her critical gaze. Nothing confused her now; nothing perplexed her in her knowledge of him. The old sense of incompleteness, of inadequacy, returned; but she understood the cause of it now; she saw with perfect clearness the defect from which it had arisen. He had missed the best because, with every virtue of the mind, he lacked the single one of the heart. Possessing every grace of character except humanity, he had failed in life because this one gift was absent.

"All my life," she said brokenly, "I have tried to find something that I could believe in—that I could keep faith with to the end. But what can one build a world on except human relations—except relations between men and women?"