It is best to write it. What I might have said to you in the garden would have been halting at best. How could I speak it all with your clear eyes upon me—all the sordid history of those years which are best buried, but whose ghosts to-night have risen again?
If in these months—this year that I have lived in these rooms, I have seemed to hide that which you will now know, it was not because I wanted to set myself before you as something more than I am. Not that I wished to deceive. It was simply that the thought of the old life brought a surging sense of helplessness, of hopelessness, of rebellion against fate, Having put it behind me, I have not wished to talk about it—to think about it—to have it, in all its tarnished tragedy, held up before your earnest, shining eyes.
For you have never known such things as I have to tell you, Mary Ballard. There has been sorrow in your life, and, I have seen of late, suffering for those you love. But, as yet, you have not doffed an ideal. You have not bowed that brave young head of yours. You have never yet turned your back upon the things which might have been.
As I have turned mine. I wish sometimes that you might have known me before the happening of these things which I am to tell you. But I wish more than all, that I might have known you. Until I came here, I did not dream that there was such a woman in the world as you. I had thought of women first, as a chivalrous boy thinks, later, as a disillusioned man. But of a woman like a young and ardent soldier, on fire to fight the winning battles of the world—of such a woman I had never dreamed.
But this year has taught me. I have seen you pushing away from you the things which would have charmed most women I have seen you pushing away wealth, and love for the mere sake of loving. I have seen you willing to work that you might hold undimmed the ideal which you had set for your womanhood. Loving and love-worthy, you have not been willing to receive unless you could give, give from the fulness of that generous nature of yours. And out of that generosity, you have given me your friendship.
And now; as I write the things which your clear eyes are to read, I am wondering whether that friendship will be withdrawn. Will you when you have heard of my losing battle, find anything in me that is worthy—will there be anything saved out of the wreck of your thought of me?
Well, here it is, and you shall judge:
I will skip the first years, except to say that my father was one of the New York Pooles who moved South after the Civil War. My mother was from Richmond. We were prosperous folk, with an unassailable social position. My mother, gracious and charming, is little more than a memory; she died when I was a child. My father married again, and died when I was in college. There were three children by this second marriage, and when the estate was settled, only a modest sum fell to my share.
I had been a lonely little boy—at college I was a dreamy, idealistic chap, with the saving grace of a love of athletics. Your brother-in-law will tell you something of my successes on our school team. That was my life—the day in the open, the nights among my books.
As time went on, I took prizes in oratory—there was a certain commencement, when the school went wild about me, and I was carried on the shoulders of my comrades.