“Pardon, Mademoiselle, for having taken your arm—it seemed best—you were evidently—” I stopped lamely, a prey to the diffidence I had felt in her presence from the first approach.
She had not moved.
“I hope I did not offend you—”
“No, no,” she said suddenly. “It was a dream—a terrible dream!”
Her voice was not yet under control. I waited, but having said this, she drew back into her silence. Presently, I heard her settling back into her chair. Quiet had returned to the deck. I sat there, keenly awake. The memory of her cry haunted me and, though the utter blackness prevented my seeing her, I had the feeling that she, too, was tremulously, nervously awake at my side.
* * * * *
Often have I wondered what makes us so blind to our own selves, and sometimes I think it is our insistence in seeing our lives as a logical development. We seek in all phases of life a working formula (formulas which are not knowledge but the substitute for knowledge) and we early adopt a formula about our own selves. We never see ourselves whole because, perhaps, we never complete our own image.
* * * * *
I know that I, too, am a slave to my own formula. I say to myself that I am an average man,—that, given a problem of action, I will do under given circumstances just what the average man will do; that, if I am better or worse, it is all in the quality of opportunity. I am influenced largely by the judgment my neighbors would pass on me—by a desire to maintain my own self-respect, or to return to it—and yet I am conscious of but a distant and imperfect acquaintance with this self which is my court of last judgment. And, when I have said all this, I am conscious that I have explained nothing,—that there is always at the bottom of myself some unpremeditated, rebellious impulse that in the moments of most determined progress towards a given point suddenly sends me blindly in another direction. What is that invisible, intangible sense? I obey by instinct something that I do not comprehend. I follow myself through changing phases and wonder at the instinct that brings me back to the level of common sense—as a ship in a storm struggles to right itself. I am here as I am to-day by some agency that mystifies me,—invisible forces from without, or some instinct from within. Yet as I look back I see no logical relation in the process.