From my own selfish point of view, I have known all along that I was foolish in pleading my cause by post instead of with the living voice. But to write seemed fairer to yourself; though I confess I could not have been easily content with letters had I known you were going to France.
In asking for a week of detachment, you are right. Indeed, I feel you have been most exquisitely right at every turn of my rude assault upon your peace. Therefore I agree, much as I shall miss your letters.
You think your letters have disappointed me; and I can discern that it is a pain to you to write them till they can flow from you more freely. But let me tell you why I prize them far more than I expected.
The day I first saw you with Miss Langley was a Saturday. You simply swept me off my feet. I had no more choice as to whether I should love you all my life or not than a cork has a choice between floating and sinking. It was the Derlingham banker who told me who you were. All that evening I sat alone in the dark, thinking. Or, rather, I didn't think. I just sat and looked, like a man in a trance, at the new world which had unrolled itself suddenly, solidly, splendidly right across the whole field of my vision.
I had always believed that love at first sight was out of my line. Indeed, I had believed that, nowadays, it was out of everybody's line; and I had suspected that, outside the romances, there had never been any such thing in the world. I had even begun to indulge a certain pride in my fastidiousness and self-control as regards women.
Don't be hurt, most dear lady, at the next step in my confession. If I must seem to disparage you for half a moment on paper, it is only that I may show why I shall revere and honour and cherish you for ever.
When I came out of that Saturday night dream or trance, I sank swiftly down, down, down into a pit of humiliation. I had always believed myself free from pride of rank or pride of wealth; but it was with an immense chagrin that I remembered how the banker had answered my off-hand question with the words "Miss Langley's maid." A blinding flash lit up all the opposition, and scorn, and ridicule I should have to undergo.
Not that it entered my mind, even at the zero of my humiliation, that I could ever give you up. The fact that you were my Destiny rose clear of my tumultuous emotions, as radiant and immutable as a virgin peak above the mean rage of a thunderstorm. But I fretted and fumed. You were the rose that I must needs gather; but why had Fate set you behind so huge and sharp and black a thorn? I asked bitterly why Fate could not have contrived that Miss Langley should have been Susan, and that you should have been Miss Langley, so that I could have come to the Grange a-wooing without a thousand maddening lets and hindrances.
Later on, and in a lesser degree, I also felt humiliated because I, who had been so proud of my cool head, suddenly found myself bowled over by mere beauty and grace, like a solitary corn-stalk before an autumn gale.
The next morning I slipped circumspectly into Traxelby church, just before the sermon. If you hold religion sacred and dear (as I feel sure you do), it may shock you to know that I looked at you through the pillars of the Langley monument for a quarter of an hour. But my thoughts were not sacrilegious. Although I thanked God for your beauty (and how beautiful you were that morning!), I worshipped God most because He had created your soul, your very self. As I watched you, I knew that you alone in all the world could charm away my spirit's restlessness and hunger--the hunger and the restlessness which I had hidden even from my own self. I recalled my loveless life; my boyhood spent among tutors and schoolmasters; my youth and early manhood at two schools and at three universities in three different countries; my last year--the year before I came back to the Towers--spent on cosmopolitan steamships and in unhomely hotels. I thought of the only women I have ever known well--my hard and shallow cousins, who are handsome and elegant only with the sort of handsomeness and elegance that ten thousand other hard and shallow women share with them. Then I looked at you again, and wanted to come home to you as a bird flies home to his nest.