“No one would need to compel you. Dear man, your devotion to her is a very beautiful thing, it’s a thing you’ve better reason to be proud of than anything you’ve ever done. You wouldn’t degrade a devotion like that by keeping her against her will.”
Eric said nothing for several moments, but he laughed to himself, and O’Rane gripped his arm as though the sneer in the laugh stung him.
“And I wonder what you think would be left for me, if I did give her up!” he resumed. “It’s no good trying to make me live in too rarified air. All this business about ‘the right thing’—I’m not cut out for Cyrano de Bergerac or for Sidney Carton; a good conscience, a glow of magnanimity—it does me no sort of good, Raney. I know what I want, I know how badly I want it. I can imagine pretty clearly what the next two years are going to be like—vegetating on a verandah in Arizona. She’s all I have left... But if there’s nothing to come back to... I’m the one that has to go through this and I want you to tell me what’s left.”
O’Rane laughed and linked arms with him.
“I’ll change lungs, if you’ll change eyes,” he murmured.
“I’m sorry! My outlook’s a bit jaundiced. I expected too much of life, I’d had a pretty fair hammering in one way or another and I thought it was going to change, to end.”
O’Rane stopped short and sighed with whimsical regret.
“Like your novels and plays,” he suggested. “Life differs from romance in that there are no happy endings. And, when you’ve learned that lesson, you must learn that life has no endings of any kind short of death. We try to divide our lives into dramatic phases, but you know that there’s no finality about your first disappointment in love; it modifies the texture of your spirit and prepares you for something else just when the dramatist scrawls his ‘Curtain’ and the novelist writes ‘The End.’ Perhaps it prepares you for another and a different love, perhaps for marriage: no one but a fool would stop his play or novel with the clash of wedding-bells. It’s not the end of anything except one stage of an endless development; it’s not the beginning of anything except the next stage of development. These dramatic and literary forms destroy our sense of continuity. Hundreds of generations have gone to the preparation of your personality; you will enrich it in a thousand ways and hand it on by blood or teaching or example to thousands of generations unborn. You ask what is left... I should answer: your personality, your ego. You have that left to build up, fortify, perfect. I don’t say that the next two years will be particularly happy, but you can come out of them a deeper, broader, bigger man... You’ll give this girl her chance?”
Eric walked on without answering. They left the Park and passed along Cleveland Row to St. James’ Street. The wind was blowing from the river, and they paused to hear Big Ben strike.
“Seven o’clock. I’d no idea we’d been talking so long,” said O’Rane. “My wife’s dining out and going to the ballet. I suppose you wouldn’t care to take pot-luck with me?”