Godwin had begun to speak again.
'This is quite in keeping with the tenor of my whole life. Whatever I undertake ends in frustration at a point where success seems to have just come within my reach. Great things and trifles—it's all the same. My course at College was broken off at the moment when I might have assured my future. Later, I made many an effort to succeed in literature, and when at length something of mine was printed in a leading review, I could not even sign it, and had no profit from the attention it excited. Now—well, you see. Laughable, isn't it?'
Sidwell scarcely withheld herself from bending forward and giving him her hand.
'What shall you do?' she asked.
'Oh, I am not afraid. I have still enough money left to support me until I can find some occupation of the old kind. Fortunately, I am not one of those men whose brains have no marketable value.'
'If you knew how it pains me to hear you!'
'If I didn't believe that, I couldn't speak to you like this. I never thought you would let me see you again, and if you hadn't asked me to come, I could never have brought myself to face you. But it would have been a miserable thing to go off without even knowing what you thought of me.'
'Should you never have written to me?'
'I think not. You find it hard to imagine that I have any pride, no doubt; but it is there, explain it how one may.'
'It would have been wrong to leave me in such uncertainty.'