I have met her: and although my continence, my solitude and my devotion were a pæan of my prescience, yet she exceeds them as the flaming day the chill night’s sleepy vision of the dawn. I have loved her. But on the sacrament of winning her and making her love me, I have not yet entered.
I come this evening to my parents, illumined in my love and in my knowledge that after dinner I shall see her ... whatever happens here, soon I shall be with Mildred: and I come also tense with resolution, dark in a presentiment of its failure. I want this very night to speak to Mildred: I want to propose our marriage. How can I do this with my pittance of salary and income? I have resolved to ask my parents’ help.
“Can’t we dine up here?” I say, as I meet them in their drawing-room at the hotel. “I want to speak seriously with you of a serious matter. Downstairs in the dining-room, it would be hard.”
I see my mother’s face and I know her intuition: “My son is in love.” And I understand, by looking at her face, the gloom that has dwelt with my glow upon this undertaking.
My mother is tall. She is going to a theater and she is dressed in a simple gown of jet and lace from which her blonde hair and her strong clear features rise in a beauty that is almost stern. My mother loves me and does not want me to marry. She would buy my dependence on her with all her fortune, if she knew how. But she does not know how. Her love has become that most sensual and most possessive of all passions: an abstract love, a love that by no living deed, no contact of service, no exchange of will, reaches the world of spirit. She begrudges me no fame, no luxury, no vice. She asks of me no hours and no secrets. Her place in my life, since my life to her is an aura of her own, is secure so long as no one filling it destroys it.
“Of course we can dine here. Clayton, will you ring for the waiter?”
She is silent, incurious, decorous: knowing already and asking of me no question.
How against her will that mothered mine can I be eloquent for her enemy?
My cause is good. I have propounded subtler and more recondite problems. I am twenty-eight. With a power that is rare I have excluded from my life all the warm nurtures of friendship and of love. My needs have not died; it is as if they have in my austere years gone forth from me and gathered to one mastering presence: Mildred. When I saw her so it was with me. Every sense, long denied, called for her: every need of my body and my soul, as waking from a trance, fused in a single passionate direction: moving toward Mildred, drawing Mildred to me. But my work is not the sort that the world pays for. That is no reason to abandon it. I cannot bring to Mildred a man wrecked of his place in the world. It is John Mark, scientist, who needs her. It is Mildred Fayn, as she lives now in her high artistry of leisure, whom I need. I cannot make of her splendor a cook or a drudge. Nor can I live with her splendor as she must be lived with, outside of my career of pure abstracted thought.
How clear it is! and how awkwardly I speak! this evening at table with my parents. I had despaired before I began. Why did I come? What else was there to do?