I went right out to the street. I had to stare again at the little handkerchief. I had to press it to my lips. The rickshaw coolies could see me; but I cared nothing for them, though the tears were crowding into my eyes.
I did not come to my senses all at once. I must have walked about until three o'clock or thereabouts. At least, it was twenty minutes past three when I found myself again in the street that leads from the Italian glacis to our little Hôtel de Chine. I was humble now, and very sad.
For I had gone to pieces this day. I had failed the woman I love. In bitter, jealous anger I had failed her.
I had discovered in myself the meanest of qualities—suspicion. And utter selfishness.
A dozen times in those hours of my revulsion Crocker might have come to kill her—and I not at hand.
It was not until I entered the hotel and observed the sleepy quiet of the office and lounge that I was reassured. I could not bring myself to go upstairs, for she had made it so heartbreakingly plain that she would not see me. But surely all was well, as yet. Had there been trouble, there would be signs of it here.
I wondered if she had gone out for her customary afternoon walk. This thought bothered me. For then she would be coming back. I could not escape seeing her. Now, I wanted to see her, and I did not want to see her. I seemed to have reached a point, at last, where I knew that I would not go to pieces again. But this was only while I was reasonably sure that I could avoid her. If I were to meet her face to face, to look again into her great blue eyes with the long, long lashes, perhaps to clasp her hand, I knew that I could not be sure of anything. Once that magic were to surge again in my heart, my reason would fly.
Such were the facts of that strange revulsion which pointed out to me for the first time a pitiful flaw in my character. I failed Heloise when her need of me was most desperate. And nothing but luck (as we term it) saved her from the worst possible consequences of my weakness.
It was the first time in my life that I had been put to a rough, hard test. And—the flaw.
I deduce from this fact the conclusion that the sheltered life, with its corollary of so-called right living, permits no true demonstration of character. That fine quality is found in the open, where men (and women) breast the rough tide of life, and blunder, and struggle, and suffer.