Cummings.—"Go on? You saw yourself, I suppose, how she hung upon every syllable you spoke, every look, every gesture?"
Bartlett.—"Yes, I saw it."
Cummings.—"You saw how completely crushed she was by your tone and manner. You're not blind. Upon my word, Bartlett, if I didn't know what a good, kind-hearted fellow you are, I should say you were the greatest ruffian alive."
Bartlett, with a groan.—"Go on! That's something like."
Cummings.—"I couldn't hear what was going on—I'll own I tried—but I could see; and to see the delicate amende she was trying to offer you, in such a way that it should not seem an amende,—a perfect study of a woman's gracious, unconscious art,—and then to see your sour refusal of it all, it made me sick."
Bartlett, with a desperate clutch at his face, like a man oppressed with some stifling vapour.—"Yes, yes! I saw it all, too! And if it had been for me, I would have given anything for such happiness. Oh, gracious powers! How dear she is! I would rather have suffered any anguish than give her pain, and yet I gave her pain! I knew how it entered her heart: I felt it in my own. But what could I do? If I am to be myself, if I am not to steal the tenderness meant for another man, the love she shows to me because I'm like somebody else, I must play the brute. But have a little mercy on me. At least, I'm a baited brute. I don't know which way to turn, I don't know what to do. She's so dear to me,—so dear in every tone of her voice, every look of her eyes, every aspiration or desire of her transparent soul, that it seems to me my whole being is nothing but a thought of her. I loved her helplessness, her pallor, her sorrow; judge how I adore her return to something like life! Oh, you blame me! You simplify this infernal perplexity of mine and label it brutality, and scold me for it. Great heaven! And yet you saw, you heard how she entered this room. In that instant the old illusion was back on her, and I was nothing. All that I had been striving and longing to be to her, and hoping and despairing to seem, was swept out of existence; I was reduced to a body without a soul, to a shadow, a counterfeit! You think I resented it? Poor girl, I pitied her so; and my own heart all the time like lead in my breast,—a dull lump of ache! I swear, I wonder I don't go mad. I suppose—why, I suppose I am insane. No man in his senses was ever bedevilled by such a maniacal hallucination. Look here, Cummings: tell me that this damnable coil isn't simply a matter of my own fancy. It'll be some little relief to know that it's real."
Cummings.—"It's real enough, my dear fellow. And it is a trial,—more than I could have believed such a fantastic thing could be."
Bartlett.—"Trial? Ordeal by fire! Torment! I can't stand it any longer."
Cummings, musingly.—"She is beautiful, isn't she, with that faint dawn of red in her cheeks,—not a colour, but a coloured light like the light that hangs round a rose-tree's boughs in the early spring! And what a magnificent movement, what a stately grace! The girl must have been a goddess!"