He lived now in a strange disquietude, reading his set books, Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Marshall, Cannan, Jevons, various works by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, amusing himself with the advanced diagrammatic economists, and grinding away at his special subject, Coöperation, from the Rochdale pioneers to the European “movement.” All this he did mechanically. His brain had been set going in a certain direction by amiable instructors whom he had never seen any reason to doubt, and it was pleasant to let it go on so moving toward that examination which was to be a gate leading to a profession higher than the life of commerce from which he had been reclaimed.
So far, so good; but George’s marriage had caused a stir-about in him. In the first place, it posed a domestic problem in economics that could not be solved on paper, and in the second it had roused him to moral revolt. He could not forget his affection for George. They had been great companions as little boys. He himself was in love, knew that love was sweet, and could not away with the fact that George’s marriage was to some extent a denial of all he had learned and gained in his own hours of tenderness. He hated to resist the idea that George was perfectly happy, but he could not help himself. His was no literary enthusiasm for romance and noble love. He had read very few romances, and of poetry he knew no more than the anthology to which Cathleen had introduced him. On the whole, he preferred comfort above all things, and George made him uncomfortable, set stirring in him an idealism, a fervor, which so swelled in him as to make him, even in his outpourings to his beloved, incapable of stringing his ideas together. Literary persons can gain a great deal of relief by the mere reiteration of the words “I love you,” with variations. Words were to René only implements, painfully inadequate, for digging out the fineness which he had begun to perceive behind his feelings. He could not forgive George for being content with mere feelings undisciplined and unrefined. He hoped innocently that the honeymoon would bring some revelation, but when bride and bridegroom returned they were more distressing than ever. They had lost their shyness. That was all. George was fatly, complacently “settled down,” and could never leave his wife alone for half an hour on end, but must be always touching her, teasing her, or openly caressing her, and she seemed to like it and to make a parade of his attentions.
René would come away boiling from an evening spent at their house, which they had called The Nest, and he would sit, either cooling himself with his large books, or heightening his fury with letters to Cathleen, now returned to Putney, which is called London. He never revised what he wrote. He had rather forgotten the charm of his boyish love-making, and had lost the young trick of visualizing his fair, needing more from her than her beauty, and now used her as an outlet, assuming in her a sympathy which neither her past conduct nor her letters revealed. The mere fact of writing was enough, and his letters became intimate and self-revelatory, a kind of running, general confession. Sometimes they were of enormous length, and the envelopes he sent away were bulky and bulging.
One night he stopped in the middle of a letter, turned back and read, realizing that he had laid bare the whole of his brother’s sexual life so far as he knew it. He was filled with a thick horror, tore the letter up, and went down to his mother to escape from the train of thought which had led to such indiscretion and betrayal. He did not escape, but found himself plunged in confession:
“Mother, I’m in love.”
“Well, I never! You’re not going to be married now?”
“No. It’s hopeless. She’s rich. At least her father is.”
“So that’s why you look so queerly at Elsie. You can’t expect them to be all alike.”
“It isn’t only that. Only I can’t get away from certain things.”
“What things?”