"Dreams that will never be clothed in being,
Mother, your sons have left with you."
The Warden groaned within himself. He was part of that Alma Mater; that city left behind in charge of that sacred gift!
He loathed himself, and this deep self-humiliation of a scrupulous gentleman was what his sister had shrunk from witnessing. It was this deep humiliation that May Dashwood fled from when she hid herself in her room that afternoon.
The Warden was not a man who spent much time in introspection. He had no subtlety of self-analysis, but what insight he had was spent in condemning himself, not in justifying himself. But now he added this to his self-accusations, that if May Dashwood had not suddenly stepped across his path and revealed to him true womanhood, gilded—yes, he used that term sardonically—gilded by beauty, he might not have seen the whole depth of his offence until now, when the crude truth about Gwendolen was forced upon him by her letter.
The Warden sat on, crushed by the weight of his humiliation. And he had been forgiven, he had been rescued from his own folly. His mistake had been wiped out, his offence pardoned.
And what about Gwendolen herself? What about this poor solitary foolish girl? What was to be her future? Swiftly she had come into his life and swiftly gone! What, indeed, was to become of her and her life?
And so the Warden sat on till the dressing-bell rang, and then he got up from his chair blindly.
He had been forgiven and rescued too easily. He did not deserve it. How was it that he had dared to quote to May Dashwood those solemn, awful words—
"And the glory of the Lord is all in all!"
It must have seemed to her a piece of arrogant self-righteousness.