When he turned back to me, it was with the evident intention of discussing further Jimmy's personal and educational problems; but I rebelled.
"Phil," I said, "I know what Susan means to you, and you know—I think—what she means to me. Now, through my weakness, stupidity, or something, Susan's in danger. Sit down please, and let me talk. I'm going to give you all the facts, everything—a full confession. It's bound, for many reasons, to be painful for both of us. I'm sorry, old man—but we'll have to rise to it for Susan's sake; see this thing through together. I feel utterly imbecile and helpless alone."
Half an hour later I had ended my monologue, and we both sat silent, staring at the dulled embers on the hearth. . . .
At length Phil drew in a slow, involuntary breath.
"Hunt," he said, "it's a humiliating thing for a professional philosopher to admit, but I simply can't trust myself to advise you. I don't know what you ought to do; I don't know what Susan ought to do; or what I should do. I don't even know what your wife should do; though I feel fairly certain that whatever it is, she will try something else. Frankly, I'm too much a part of it all, too heartsick, for honest thought."
He smiled drearily and added, as if at random: "'Physician, heal thyself.' What an abysmal joke! How the fiends of hell must treasure it. They have only one better—'Man is a reasonable being!'" He rose, or rather he seemed to be propelled from his chair. "Hunt! Would you really like to know what all my days and nights of intense study have come to? The kind of man you've turned to for strength? My life has come to just this: I love her, and she doesn't love me!
"Oh!" he cried—"Go home. For God's sake, go home! I'm ashamed. . . ."
So I departed, like Omar, through the same door wherein I went; but not before I had grasped—as it seemed to me for the first time—Phil's hand.
VIII
There are some verses in Susan's notebook of this period, themselves undated, and never subsequently published, which—from their position on the page—must have been written about this time and may have been during the course of the momentous evening on which I met Jimmy Kane at Phil Farmer's rooms. I give them now, not as a favorable specimen of her work, since she thought best to exclude them from her first volume, but because they throw some light at least on the complicated and rather obscure state of mind that was then hers. They have no title, and need none. If you should feel they need interpretation—"guarda e passa"! They are not for you.