I am bound to confess that the idea of marriage with you always struck me as fantastic and improbable. I never, I believe, considered it seriously. I knew something would happen to put an end to our plans....
... Of course I am in the wrong. You have been very kind to me and from the ordinary point of view you would doubtless have made a very good husband. You are quite entitled to consider yourself shabbily treated. I am wholly in the wrong. But I am not going to make myself everlastingly unhappy just to put myself in the right. And whether you would have made me a good husband or not, I should certainly have made you a bad wife. I am a peculiar person, and I would never marry a man just because he would make a good husband.... Surely you don’t imagine I am going to marry you just to let you out of the difficulty of explaining things at home? ... A thing like that proves at once the complete misunderstanding that exists between us two.... You must tell your parents and Helen exactly what has happened, viz. that I have jilted you. If you were a woman you could claim a few hundred pounds damages for breach of promise.... Tell them I have jilted you because I could not bear the thought of marrying you. Blame me entirely: I am heartless and a flirt, cruel, treacherous and anything else you like. Only I am not such a fool as to marry somebody I don’t want to marry....
Don’t imagine I am in love with somebody else. At present I am not in love with anybody. At one time I thought I was in love with you, but I am doubtful if it ever was so really. I think it was just that you hypnotized me by being in love with me yourself. I mean, I was so interested in your experience....
I don’t ask you to forgive me. Because forgiving won’t make any difference. I may have done right or I may have done wrong, but I have done what I would do over again if I had to. There is no repentance in me. It is idle to pretend I am sorry. I am extraordinarily glad to have got out of a difficult position....
This letter, by the way, is the first sincere letter I have ever written to you. I do not mean that the others were all insincere: I mean that, compared with this one for truth and sincerity, the others were simply—nothing....
As to my present attitude towards you I will be offensively straightforward. I do not like you. That ought to convince you finally of the uselessness of answering this letter....
§ 8
A cold May day, so chilly that a fire seemed the most welcome thing on earth. Seven in the evening, and it was the last lesson of the quarter. When she reached “Claremont,” Verreker was not there. He had been up to the City, and a slight accident outside Liverpool Street Station had delayed the trains. The maid showed her into the music-room and left her alone. She sat in one of the big chairs by the fire and felt astonishingly miserable. The room had regained its normal condition; the surplus furniture, the books, papers, writing-desk, etc., had been taken away: but a grandfather clock that had not originally been there now occupied a permanent position in the corner. The embers were burning low, and shadows were darkening all around: the black and white vista of piano keys straggled obscurely in the background; the clock was ticking sleepily away. Far into the dim distance of the ceiling loomed the polished splendour of the raised sound-board....
Why did she feel miserable?
It was something in her soul.