CHAPTER XVI
He saw matters with rather more reasonable eyes when he awoke after six hours of very refreshing sleep—more than his poor mother had during the whole night. He saw that all that passionate longing for her which had taken possession of him in the early night was of no effect. He could not possibly have her with him inside twenty-four hours, as was his desire.
In the new light that came to him he saw a good many things. He saw that there were such elements as delicacy and decency which were highly respected by all respectable young women, and that in his case the amalgamation of the two meant delay. Was she a girl, he asked himself, who would be likely to fall in love with such a fellow as he? He could not bring himself to answer this question without a certain sinking at heart. All the conceit had been knocked out of him with the broadening of the light of day. He no longer felt himself to be a conqueror. The brazen bucklers of the Trojan heroes were not for him. He felt that he was not brave enough even to be a suitor. He feared her eyes—they were beautiful eyes, but they were capable of expressing a pretty fair amount of derision when occasion arose, and he could not imagine them wearing any other expression when he thought of his standing before her and asking her if she would consent to love him.
What chance would he or any other man have with that particular girl? Even if she were well disposed in regard to him, what would that amount to in the face of the experience which had been hers? Had she not had enough experience of men, and of marrying, to last her for some time at any rate, if not for the rest of her life? And was he, Jack Wingfield, the sort of man who would tempt that girl into a second adventure? In spite of his recent successes—at tennis and in his own Augean dairy—he had not got out of his old habit of thinking slightingly of himself and the possibility of his reaching to any high level of attainment. What he had achieved the day before he had achieved through her. He placed it to her credit without any reservation—he did not deduct even the customary commission which should have accrued to him as an agent.
And when she had shown herself to be strong enough to make him do all that he had done, was she likely to be weak enough to listen to his prayer?
All this form of reflection was very disheartening to him. He was a very different man indeed from the one who had taken part in those fancy flights on the terrace before the dawn, when he had put his cheek down to that cushion where he had pictured her head to be lying.
“Lord, what a bounder!” was the thought that came to him from that reflection now.
In the course of his reflections he did not even get so far as his mother had gone, when she had thought that, let the worst come to the worst—the best to the best was how he would have put it—a full year was bound to pass before he could have her with him. There was no need for him to draw upon so distant a source of uneasiness when there were so many others to supply him close at hand.