It's no use blinking the fact that I'm involved, up to the ears, in a very, very serious affair.
Midnight.
I can't sleep.
This is altogether too frightful.
Fortunately Susan was perfectly stolid. If she'd been awkward, goodness knows what I might have said or done. I simply told her that we must have a thorough talk, once for all, in the morning; and she went to bed without a murmur.
Susan a mystic! Susan approaching with exquisite reverence the sacred mystery of Love! Susan in retreat, like a saintly nun!
If I could only laugh and laugh and laugh till I woke up the whole hotel, it wouldn't so much matter. But I can't even smile. Ruddington is too terribly in earnest. And it's my fault.
Some parts of his letter I hate. I would never have believed that he could make so outrageously free with my name. So long as Susan is my maid, I call it abominable taste to drag me in like that. Indeed, I hardly see how I can do otherwise than wash my hands of the entire business forthwith.
But if I do ... what then? If Susan is left to concoct a reply, and to use a teaspoonful of ink to every page, it will be such a shattering bombshell in the golden midst of his dreams. And the man, on the whole, is too likeable for me to wound him deeply if I can help it.
Perhaps what I ought to do is to write by the same post as Susan, and with her full knowledge, a frank confession of my part in the affair. He will be astonished and disappointed and a bit hurt in his dignity, but he can't fairly resent my having helped Susan. After all, it's his fault, not mine, that he's perused my few short and insignificant letters through such rose-coloured glasses that they have seemed like the utterances of a divinity. It's his infatuation, far more than my bungling, which has magnified and idealized Susan into a goddess. Whether he can turn the telescope round, so to speak, and look at Susan through the other end till he sees her in all the tininess of her actual spiritual and mental stature; and whether, when he has seen her as she is, he can still go on worshipping her--all this is more his affair than mine. I'll write the letter now.