“You have a sense of duty toward your frivolous cousins; none toward your friend. I admire your distinctions.”
“But, Tom, they would all have been insulted!”
“Whether I was insulted had no importance....”
So it went. David was inexorably and forever in the wrong.
“Your cousins, your uncle, your aunt. I am to judge you care more for them than for me. They mean more to you. Doubtless their ideas, also.”
He flayed David’s smugness: his cowardice: his failure to grow up. David’s sentiment was perfunctory: his sensibilities were dull: he had no recognition of what was going on in the minds and hearts of those who should have been dear to him. Loving meant taking. Tom flung him dolorously down to a level with that cousin whose company he had preferred and loyalty to whom, as against Tom, he had elected. David followed by the side of his tormentor, as by the side of fate....
Near where they lived was a little Square. It lay blue beneath the green haze of the lamplights. It was timid there under the sweep of the City. The buildings and the high flare of movement over the night made it deep like a well. Tom and David paced round it. Their steps were harsh to David as if in dissonance to the Square’s sweet reticence. They knew they must have this out ere they passed through the door.
A dull weight was on David. The crystal night was black and through the blackness pain flashed like lightning. All this was within him. About all this was he, numb and unable to feel himself. He knew the dark by the lightning.
It was not the sense of wrong that made him suffer. It was the impediment to that sense. Had he been able to are noble and I am unworthy, it would have been easeful and sweet. He had great longing to do just this. It was the something hindering him that hurt.
Why was it? He had no answer to Tom. One by one, his objections had disappeared as he voiced them—his objections to Tom. Was it perhaps that he was proud and vain—not big enough to avow his faults? Oh, if it was but that! And then, the hateful alternative that blocked his emotions. For was it, perhaps, that he had not really voiced his objections?... that all of these words were far from the true misgivings?