“No. He wrote again. He doesn’t seem to have been perfectly satisfied with the chivalry of the letter you’ve just read. He’s always great on chivalry, you know. And it certainly would be hard to make that last letter dovetail in with his previous utterances on a man’s instinct to guard and protect the opposite sex.”
Barrett threw down a bulky letter and—may God forgive us—Parker and I read it together under the lamp.
“I can’t go on,” said Parker after a few minutes.
“You must,” said Barrett savagely.
We read it through from the first word to the last, and as we read Parker’s face became as grave as Barrett’s.
It is an awful thing when a poseur ceases to pose, when an egoist becomes a human being. But this is what had befallen Maitland. The thing had happened which one would have thought could not possibly happen. He had fallen in love.
I can’t put in the whole of his letter here. Indeed, I don’t remember it very clearly. But I shall not forget the gist of it while I live.
After he had despatched his other letter he told her the scales of egotism had suddenly dropped from his eyes, and he had realised that he loved for the first time, and that he could not face life without her, and that the thought that he might lose her, had possibly already lost her by his own fault, was unendurable to him. For in the new light in which now all was bathed he realised the meanness of his previous letter, of his whole intercourse with her: that he had never for a moment been truthful with her: that he had attitudinised before her in order to impress her: that he had always taken the ground that he was difficult to please, and that many women had paid court to him, but that it was all chimerical. No woman had ever cared for him except his mother, and a little nursery governess when he was a lad. During the last twenty years he had made faint, half-hearted attempts to ingratiate himself with attractive women: and when the attempts failed, as they always had failed, he had had the meanness to revenge himself by implying that his withdrawal had been caused by their wish to give him more than the friendship he craved. He had said over and over again that he valued his independence too much to marry, but it was not true. He did not value it a bit. He had been pining to get married for years and years. He saw now that to say that kind of thing was only to say in other words that he had never lived. He had not. He had only talked about living. He abased himself before her with a kind of passion. He told her that he did not see how any woman, and she least of all, could bring herself to care for a man of his age and appearance, even if he had been simple and humble and sincere, much less one who had taken trouble to show himself so ignoble, so petty, so self-engrossed, so arrogant. But the fact remained that he loved her; she had unconsciously taught him to abhor himself, and he only loved her the more, he worshipped her, well or ill, kind or unkind, whether she could return it or not.
We stared at each other in a ghastly silence. I expected some ribald remark from Barrett, but he made none.
“What’s to be done?” said Parker at last.