“Burn it? All I have left of you?”
She turned swimming eyes on me.
“You are good, Marcus—after what I have told you—you do not feel bitterly against me?”
“For what? For being quixotic? For going to martyrdom for an ideal?”
“You did not listen when I spoke about Carlotta?”
“Oh, my dear!” said I.
And now she has gone. We kissed at parting—a kiss of remembrance and renunciation. Shall we ever meet again?
Darkness gathers round me, and I am tired, tired, and I would that I could sleep like Rip Van Winkle, and awake an old man, with an old man’s passionless resignation; or better, awake not at all. Such poor fools as I are better dead.
I look back and see all my philosophy refuted, all my prim little opinions lying prone like dolls with the sawdust knocked out of them. All these years I have been judging Judith with an ignorance as cruel as it has been complacent. Verily I have been the fag end of wisdom. So I forbear to judge her now.
If I had loved Judith with the great passion of a man’s love for woman, not all the converted rascals in Christendom could have come between us.