“So long as our confidence lasts,” she repeated after him.
“Ah!” cried Sir Richmond. “There it is! So long as our confidence lasts! So long as one keeps one’s mind steady. That is what I came away with Dr. Martineau to discuss. I went to him for advice. I haven’t known him for more than a month. It’s amusing to find myself preaching forth to you. It was just faith I had lost. Suddenly I had lost my power of work. My confidence in the rightness of what I was doing evaporated. My will failed me. I don’t know if you will understand what that means. It wasn’t that my reason didn’t assure me just as certainly as ever that what I was trying to do was the right thing to try to do. But somehow that seemed a cold and personally unimportant proposition. The life had gone out of it....”
He paused as if arrested by a momentary doubt.
“I don’t know why I tell you these things,” he said.
“You tell them me,” she said.
“It’s a little like a patient in a hydropath retailing his ailments.”
“No. No. Go on.”
“I began to think now that what took the go out of me as my work went on was the lack of any real fellowship in what I was doing. It was the pressure of the opposition in the Committee, day afterday. It was being up against men who didn’t reason against me but who just showed by everything they did that the things I wanted to achieve didn’t matter to them one rap. It was going back to a home, lunching in clubs, reading papers, going about a world in which all the organization, all the possibility of the organization I dream of is tacitly denied. I don’t know if it seems an extraordinary confession of weakness to you, but that steady refusal of the majority of my Committee to come into co-operation with me has beaten me—or at any rate has come very near to beating me. Most of them you know are such able men. You can FEEL their knowledge and commonsense. They, and everybody about me, seemed busy and intent upon more immediate things, that seemed more real to them than this remote, theoretical, PRIGGISH end I have set for myself....”
He paused.
“Go on,” said Miss Grammont. “I think I understand this.”