THE odd thing is that what sticks out in my recollection of the rest
of that evening was Leonora's saying:
"Of course you might marry her," and, when I asked whom, she
answered:
"The girl."
Now that is to me a very amazing thing--amazing for the light of
possibilities that it casts into the human heart. For I had never had
the slightest conscious idea of marrying the girl; I never had the
slightest idea even of caring for her. I must have talked in an odd
way, as people do who are recovering from an anaesthetic. It is as
if one had a dual personality, the one I being entirely unconscious
of the other. I had thought nothing; I had said such an
extraordinary thing. I don't know that analysis of my own
psychology matters at all to this story. I should say that it didn't or,
at any rate, that I had given enough of it. But that odd remark of
mine had a strong influence upon what came after. I mean, that
Leonora would probably never have spoken to me at all about
Florence's relations with Edward if I hadn't said, two hours after
my wife's death:
"Now I can marry the girl."
She had, then, taken it for granted that I had been suffering all that
she had been suffering, or, at least, that I had permitted all that
she had permitted. So that, a month ago, about a week after the
funeral of poor Edward, she could say to me in the most natural
way in the world--I had been talking about the duration of my stay
at Branshaw--she said with her clear, reflective intonation:
"Oh, stop here for ever and ever if you can." And then she added,
"You couldn't be more of a brother to me, or more of a counsellor,
or more of a support. You are all the consolation I have in the
world. And isn't it odd to think that if your wife hadn't been my
husband's mistress, you would probably never have been here at
all?"
That was how I got the news--full in the face, like that. I didn't say
anything and I don't suppose I felt anything, unless maybe it was
with that mysterious and unconscious self that underlies most
people. Perhaps one day when I am unconscious or walking in my
sleep I may go and spit upon poor Edward's grave. It seems about
the most unlikely thing I could do; but there it is. No, I remember
no emotion of any sort, but just the clear feeling that one has from
time to time when one hears that some Mrs So-and-So is au mieux
with a certain gentleman. It made things plainer, suddenly, to my
curiosity. It was as if I thought, at that moment, of a windy
November evening, that, when I came to think it over afterwards,
a dozen unexplained things would fit themselves into place. But I
wasn't thinking things over then. I remember that distinctly. I was
just sitting back, rather stiffly, in a deep arm-chair. That is what I
remember. It was twilight.
Branshaw Manor lies in a little hollow with lawns across it and
pine-woods on the fringe of the dip. The immense wind, coming
from across the forest, roared overhead. But the view from the
window was perfectly quiet and grey. Not a thing stirred, except a
couple of rabbits on the extreme edge of the lawn. It was
Leonora's own little study that we were in and we were waiting for
the tea to be brought. I, as I said, was sitting in the deep chair,
Leonora was standing in the window twirling the wooden acorn at
the end of the window-blind cord desultorily round and round.
She looked across the lawn and said, as far as I can remember:
"Edward has been dead only ten days and yet there are rabbits on
the lawn."
I understand that rabbits do a great deal of harm to the short grass
in England. And then she turned round to me and said without any
adornment at all, for I remember her exact words:
"I think it was stupid of Florence to commit suicide."
I cannot tell you the extraordinary sense of leisure that we two
seemed to have at that moment. It wasn't as if we were waiting for
a train, it wasn't as if we were waiting for a meal--it was just that
there was nothing to wait for. Nothing. There was an extreme
stillness with the remote and intermittent sound of the wind.
There was the grey light in that brown, small room. And there
appeared to be nothing else in the world. I knew then that Leonora
was about to let me into her full confidence. It was as if--or no, it
was the actual fact that--Leonora with an odd English sense of
decency had determined to wait until Edward had been in his
grave for a full week before she spoke. And with some vague
motive of giving her an idea of the extent to which she must
permit herself to make confidences, I said slowly --and these
words too I remember with exactitude--"Did Florence commit
suicide? I didn't know."
I was just, you understand, trying to let her know that, if she were
going to speak she would have to talk about a much wider range
of things than she had before thought necessary.
So that that was the first knowledge I had that Florence had
committed suicide. It had never entered my head. You may think
that I had been singularly lacking in suspiciousness; you may
consider me even to have been an imbecile. But consider the
position.
In such circumstances of clamour, of outcry, of the crash of many
people running together, of the professional reticence of such
people as hotel-keepers, the traditional reticence of such "good
people" as the Ashburnhams--in such circumstances it is some
little material object, always, that catches the eye and that appeals
to the imagination. I had no possible guide to the idea of suicide
and the sight of the little flask of nitrate of amyl in Florence's
hand suggested instantly to my mind the idea of the failure of her
heart. Nitrate of amyl, you understand, is the drug that is given to
relieve sufferers from angina pectoris.
Seeing Florence, as I had seen her, running with a white face and
with one hand held over her heart, and seeing her, as I
immediately afterwards saw her, lying upon her bed with the so
familiar little brown flask clenched in her fingers, it was natural
enough for my mind to frame the idea. As happened now and
again, I thought, she had gone out without her remedy and, having
felt an attack coming on whilst she was in the gardens, she had run
in to get the nitrate in order, as quickly as possible, to obtain relief.
And it was equally inevitable my mind should frame the thought
that her heart, unable to stand the strain of the running, should
have broken in her side. How could I have known that, during all
the years of our married life, that little brown flask had contained,
not nitrate of amyl, but prussic acid? It was inconceivable.
Why, not even Edward Ashburnham, who was, after all more
intimate with her than I was, had an inkling of the truth. He just
thought that she had dropped dead of heart disease. Indeed, I
fancy that the only people who ever knew that Florence had
committed suicide were Leonora, the Grand Duke, the head of the
police and the hotel-keeper. I mention these last three because my
recollection of that night is only the sort of pinkish effulgence
from the electric-lamps in the hotel lounge. There seemed to bob
into my consciousness, like floating globes, the faces of those
three. Now it would be the bearded, monarchical, benevolent head
of the Grand Duke; then the sharp-featured, brown,
cavalry-moustached feature of the chief of police; then the
globular, polished and high-collared vacuousness that represented
Monsieur Schontz, the proprietor of the hotel. At times one head
would be there alone, at another the spiked helmet of the official
would be close to the healthy baldness of the prince; then M.
Schontz's oiled locks would push in between the two. The
sovereign's soft, exquisitely trained voice would say, "Ja, ja, ja!"
each word dropping out like so many soft pellets of suet; the
subdued rasp of the official would come: "Zum Befehl
Durchlaucht," like five revolver-shots; the voice of M. Schontz
would go on and on under its breath like that of an unclean priest
reciting from his breviary in the corner of a railway-carriage. That
was how it presented itself to me.
They seemed to take no notice of me; I don't suppose that I was
even addressed by one of them. But, as long as one or the other, or
all three of them were there, they stood between me as if, I being
the titular possessor of the corpse, had a right to be present at their
conferences. Then they all went away and I was left alone for a
long time.
And I thought nothing; absolutely nothing. I had no ideas; I had no
strength. I felt no sorrow, no desire for action, no inclination to go
upstairs and fall upon the body of my wife. I just saw the pink
effulgence, the cane tables, the palms, the globular match-holders,
the indented ash-trays. And then Leonora came to me and it
appears that I addressed to her that singular remark:
"Now I can marry the girl."
But I have given you absolutely the whole of my recollection of
that evening, as it is the whole of my recollection of the
succeeding three or four days. I was in a state just simply
cataleptic. They put me to bed and I stayed there; they brought me
my clothes and I dressed; they led me to an open grave and I stood
beside it. If they had taken me to the edge of a river, or if they had
flung me beneath a railway train, I should have been drowned or
mangled in the same spirit. I was the walking dead.
Well, those are my impressions.
What had actually happened had been this. I pieced it together
afterwards. You will remember I said that Edward Ashburnham
and the girl had gone off, that night, to a concert at the Casino and
that Leonora had asked Florence, almost immediately after their
departure, to follow them and to perform the office of chaperone.
Florence, you may also remember, was all in black, being the
mourning that she wore for a deceased cousin, Jean Hurlbird. It
was a very black night and the girl was dressed in cream-coloured
muslin, that must have glimmered under the tall trees of the dark
park like a phosphorescent fish in a cupboard. You couldn't have
had a better beacon.
And it appears that Edward Ashburnham led the girl not up the
straight allée that leads to the Casino, but in under the dark trees
of the park. Edward Ashburnham told me all this in his final
outburst. I have told you that, upon that occasion, he became
deucedly vocal. I didn't pump him. I hadn't any motive. At that
time I didn't in the least connect him with my wife. But the fellow
talked like a cheap novelist.--Or like a very good novelist for the
matter of that, if it's the business of a novelist to make you see
things clearly. And I tell you I see that thing as clearly as if it were
a dream that never left me. It appears that, not very far from the
Casino, he and the girl sat down in the darkness upon a public
bench. The lights from that place of entertainment must have
reached them through the tree-trunks, since, Edward said, he
could quite plainly see the girl's face--that beloved face with the
high forehead, the queer mouth, the tortured eyebrows, and the
direct eyes. And to Florence, creeping up behind them, they must
have presented the appearance of silhouettes. For I take it that
Florence came creeping up behind them over the short grass to a
tree that, I quite well remember, was immediately behind that
public seat. It was not a very difficult feat for a woman instinct
with jealousy. The Casino orchestra was, as Edward remembered
to tell me, playing the Rakocsy march, and although it was not
loud enough, at that distance, to drown the voice of Edward
Ashburnham it was certainly sufficiently audible to efface,
amongst the noises of the night, the slight brushings and rustlings
that might have been made by the feet of Florence or by her gown
in coming over the short grass. And that miserable woman must
have got it in the face, good and strong. It must have been horrible
for her. Horrible! Well, I suppose she deserved all that she got.
Anyhow, there you have the picture, the immensely tall trees, elms
most of them, towering and feathering away up into the black
mistiness that trees seem to gather about them at night; the
silhouettes of those two upon the seat; the beams of light coming
from the Casino, the woman all in black peeping with fear behind
the tree-trunk. It is melodrama; but I can't help it.
And then, it appears, something happened to Edward Ashburnham.
He assured me--and I see no reason for disbelieving him--that
until that moment he had had no idea whatever of caring for the
girl. He said that he had regarded her exactly as he would have
regarded a daughter. He certainly loved her, but with a very deep,
very tender and very tranquil love. He had missed her when she
went away to her convent-school; he had been glad when she had
returned. But of more than that he had been totally unconscious.
Had he been conscious of it, he assured me, he would have fled
from it as from a thing accursed. He realized that it was the last
outrage upon Leonora. But the real point was his entire
unconsciousness. He had gone with her into that dark park with no
quickening of the pulse, with no desire for the intimacy of
solitude. He had gone, intending to talk about polo-ponies, and
tennis-racquets; about the temperament of the reverend Mother at
the convent she had left and about whether her frock for a party
when they got home should be white or blue. It hadn't come into
his head that they would talk about a single thing that they hadn't
always talked about; it had not even come into his head that the
tabu which extended around her was not inviolable. And then,
suddenly, that-- He was very careful to assure me that at that time
there was no physical motive about his declaration. It did not
appear to him to be a matter of a dark night and a propinquity and
so on. No, it was simply of her effect on the moral side of his life
that he appears to have talked. He said that he never had the
slightest notion to enfold her in his arms or so much as to touch
her hand. He swore that he did not touch her hand. He said that
they sat, she at one end of the bench, he at the other; he leaning
slightly towards her and she looking straight towards the light of
the Casino, her face illuminated by the lamps. The expression
upon her face he could only describe as "queer". At another time,
indeed, he made it appear that he thought she was glad. It is easy
to imagine that she was glad, since at that time she could have had
no idea of what was really happening. Frankly, she adored Edward
Ashburnham. He was for her, in everything that she said at that
time, the model of humanity, the hero, the athlete, the father of his
country, the law-giver. So that for her, to be suddenly, intimately
and overwhelmingly praised must have been a matter for mere
gladness, however overwhelming it were. It must have been as if a
god had approved her handiwork or a king her loyalty. She just sat
still and listened, smiling. And it seemed to her that all the
bitterness of her childhood, the terrors of her tempestuous father,
the bewailings of her cruel-tongued mother were suddenly atoned
for. She had her recompense at last. Because, of course, if you
come to figure it out, a sudden pouring forth of passion by a man
whom you regard as a cross between a pastor and a father might,
to a woman, have the aspect of mere praise for good conduct. It
wouldn't, I mean, appear at all in the light of an attempt to gain
possession. The girl, at least, regarded him as firmly anchored to
his Leonora. She had not the slightest inkling of any infidelities.
He had always spoken to her of his wife in terms of reverence and
deep affection. He had given her the idea that he regarded
Leonora as absolutely impeccable and as absolutely satisfying.
Their union had appeared to her to be one of those blessed things
that are spoken of and contemplated with reverence by her church.
So that, when he spoke of her as being the person he cared most
for in the world, she naturally thought that he meant to except
Leonora and she was just glad. It was like a father saying that he
approved of a marriageable daughter . . . And Edward, when he
realized what he was doing, curbed his tongue at once. She was
just glad and she went on being just glad.
I suppose that that was the most monstrously wicked thing that
Edward Ashburnham ever did in his life. And yet I am so near to
all these people that I cannot think any of them wicked. It is
impossible of me to think of Edward Ashburnham as anything but
straight, upright and honourable. That, I mean, is, in spite of
everything, my permanent view of him. I try at times by dwelling
on some of the things that he did to push that image of him away,
as you might try to push aside a large pendulum. But it always
comes back--the memory of his innumerable acts of kindness, of
his efficiency, of his unspiteful tongue. He was such a fine fellow.
So I feel myself forced to attempt to excuse him in this as in so
many other things. It is, I have no doubt, a most monstrous thing
to attempt to corrupt a young girl just out of a convent. But I think
Edward had no idea at all of corrupting her. I believe that he
simply loved her. He said that that was the way of it and I, at least,
believe him and I believe too that she was the only woman he ever
really loved. He said that that was so; and he did enough to prove
it. And Leonora said that it was so and Leonora knew him to the
bottom of his heart.
I have come to be very much of a cynic in these matters; I mean
that it is impossible to believe in the permanence of man's or
woman's love. Or, at any rate, it is impossible to believe in the
permanence of any early passion. As I see it, at least, with regard
to man, a love affair, a love for any definite woman--is something
in the nature of a widening of the experience. With each new
woman that a man is attracted to there appears to come a
broadening of the outlook, or, if you like, an acquiring of new
territory. A turn of the eyebrow, a tone of the voice, a queer
characteristic gesture--all these things, and it is these things that
cause to arise the passion of love--all these things are like so many
objects on the horizon of the landscape that tempt a man to walk
beyond the horizon, to explore. He wants to get, as it were, behind
those eyebrows with the peculiar turn, as if he desired to see the
world with the eyes that they overshadow. He wants to hear that
voice applying itself to every possible proposition, to every
possible topic; he wants to see those characteristic gestures against
every possible background. Of the question of the sex-instinct I
know very little and I do not think that it counts for very much in
a really great passion. It can be aroused by such nothings--by an
untied shoelace, by a glance of the eye in passing-- that I think it
might be left out of the calculation. I don't mean to say that any
great passion can exist without a desire for consummation. That
seems to me to be a commonplace and to be therefore a matter
needing no comment at all. It is a thing, with all its accidents, that
must be taken for granted, as, in a novel, or a biography, you take
it for granted that the characters have their meals with some
regularity. But the real fierceness of desire, the real heat of a
passion long continued and withering up the soul of a man is the
craving for identity with the woman that he loves. He desires to
see with the same eyes, to touch with the same sense of touch, to
hear with the same ears, to lose his identity, to be enveloped, to be
supported. For, whatever may be said of the relation of the sexes,
there is no man who loves a woman that does not desire to come to
her for the renewal of his courage, for the cutting asunder of his
difficulties. And that will be the mainspring of his desire for her.
We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the
outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist. So, for a
time, if such a passion come to fruition, the man will get what he
wants. He will get the moral support, the encouragement, the relief
from the sense of loneliness, the assurance of his own worth. But
these things pass away; inevitably they pass away as the shadows
pass across sundials. It is sad, but it is so. The pages of the book
will become familiar; the beautiful corner of the road will have
been turned too many times. Well, this is the saddest story. And
yet I do believe that for every man there comes at last a woman--or
no, that is the wrong way of formulating it. For every man there
comes at last a time of life when the woman who then sets her
seal upon his imagination has set her seal for good. He will travel
over no more horizons; he will never again set the knapsack over
his shoulders; he will retire from those scenes. He will have gone
out of the business. That at any rate was the case with Edward and
the poor girl. It was quite literally the case. It was quite literally
the case that his passions--for the mistress of the Grand Duke, for
Mrs Basil, for little Mrs Maidan, for Florence, for whom you
will--these passions were merely preliminary canters compared to
his final race with death for her. I am certain of that. I am not
going to be so American as to say that all true love demands some
sacrifice. It doesn't. But I think that love will be truer and more
permanent in which self-sacrifice has been exacted. And, in the
case of the other women, Edward just cut in and cut them out as
he did with the polo-ball from under the nose of Count Baron von
Lelöffel. I don't mean to say that he didn't wear himself as thin as
a lath in the endeavour to capture the other women; but over her
he wore himself to rags and tatters and death--in the effort to
leave her alone.
And, in speaking to her on that night, he wasn't, I am convinced,
committing a baseness. It was as if his passion for her hadn't
existed; as if the very words that he spoke, without knowing that
he spoke them, created the passion as they went along. Before he
spoke, there was nothing; afterwards, it was the integral fact of his
life. Well, I must get back to my story.
And my story was concerning itself with Florence--with Florence,
who heard those words from behind the tree. That of course is
only conjecture, but I think the conjecture is pretty well justified.
You have the fact that those two went out, that she followed them
almost immediately afterwards through the darkness and, a little
later, she came running back to the hotel with that pallid face and
the hand clutching her dress over her heart. It can't have been only
Bagshawe. Her face was contorted with agony before ever her
eyes fell upon me or upon him beside me. But I dare say Bagshawe
may have been the determining influence in her suicide. Leonora
says that she had that flask, apparently of nitrate of amyl, but
actually of prussic acid, for many years and that she was
determined to use it if ever I discovered the nature of her
relationship with that fellow Jimmy. You see, the mainspring of
her nature must have been vanity. There is no reason why it
shouldn't have been; I guess it is vanity that makes most of us
keep straight, if we do keep straight, in this world.
If it had been merely a matter of Edward's relations with the girl I
dare say Florence would have faced it out. She would no doubt
have made him scenes, have threatened him, have appealed to his
sense of humour, to his promises. But Mr Bagshawe and the fact
that the date was the 4th of August must have been too much for
her superstitious mind. You see, she had two things that she
wanted. She wanted to be a great lady, installed in Branshaw
Teleragh. She wanted also to retain my respect.
She wanted, that is to say, to retain my respect for as long as she
lived with me. I suppose, if she had persuaded Edward
Ashburnham to bolt with her she would have let the whole thing
go with a run. Or perhaps she would have tried to exact from me a
new respect for the greatness of her passion on the lines of all for
love and the world well lost. That would be just like Florence.
In all matrimonial associations there is, I believe, one constant
factor --a desire to deceive the person with whom one lives as to
some weak spot in one's character or in one's career. For it is
intolerable to live constantly with one human being who perceives
one's small meannesses. It is really death to do so--that is why so
many marriages turn out unhappily.
I, for instance, am a rather greedy man; I have a taste for good
cookery and a watering tooth at the mere sound of the names of
certain comestibles. If Florence had discovered this secret of mine
I should have found her knowledge of it so unbearable that I never
could have supported all the other privations of the régime that
she extracted from me. I am bound to say that Florence never
discovered this secret.
Certainly she never alluded to it; I dare say she never took
sufficient interest in me.
And the secret weakness of Florence--the weakness that she could
not bear to have me discover, was just that early escapade with the
fellow called Jimmy. Let me, as this is in all probability the last
time I shall mention Florence's name, dwell a little upon the
change that had taken place in her psychology. She would not, I
mean, have minded if I had discovered that she was the mistress
of Edward Ashburnham. She would rather have liked it. Indeed,
the chief trouble of poor Leonora in those days was to keep
Florence from making, before me, theatrical displays, on one line
or another, of that very fact. She wanted, in one mood, to come
rushing to me, to cast herself on her knees at my feet and to
declaim a carefully arranged, frightfully emotional, outpouring as
to her passion. That was to show that she was like one of the great
erotic women of whom history tells us. In another mood she
would desire to come to me disdainfully and to tell me that I was
considerably less than a man and that what had happened was what
must happen when a real male came along. She wanted to say that
in cool, balanced and sarcastic sentences. That was when she
wished to appear like the heroine of a French comedy. Because of
course she was always play acting.
But what she didn't want me to know was the fact of her first
escapade with the fellow called Jimmy. She had arrived at
figuring out the sort of low-down Bowery tough that that fellow
was. Do you know what it is to shudder, in later life, for some
small, stupid action--usually for some small, quite genuine piece
of emotionalism--of your early life? Well, it was that sort of
shuddering that came over Florence at the thought that she had
surrendered to such a low fellow. I don't know that she need have
shuddered. It was her footing old uncle's work; he ought never to
have taken those two round the world together and shut himself
up in his cabin for the greater part of the time. Anyhow, I am
convinced that the sight of Mr Bagshawe and the thought that Mr
Bagshawe--for she knew that unpleasant and toadlike
personality--the thought that Mr Bagshawe would almost certainly
reveal to me that he had caught her coming out of Jimmy's
bedroom at five o'clock in the morning on the 4th of August,
1900--that was the determining influence in her suicide. And no
doubt the effect of the date was too much for her superstitious
personality. She had been born on the 4th of August; she had
started to go round the world on the 4th of August; she had
become a low fellow's mistress on the 4th of August. On the same
day of the year she had married me; on that 4th she had lost
Edward's love, and Bagshawe had appeared like a sinister
omen--like a grin on the face of Fate. It was the last straw. She ran
upstairs, arranged herself decoratively upon her bed--she was a
sweetly pretty woman with smooth pink and white cheeks, long
hair, the eyelashes falling like a tiny curtain on her cheeks. She
drank the little phial of prussic acid and there she lay.--Oh,
extremely charming and clear-cut--looking with a puzzled
expression at the electric-light bulb that hung from the ceiling, or
perhaps through it, to the stars above. Who knows? Anyhow, there
was an end of Florence.
You have no idea how quite extraordinarily for me that was the
end of Florence. From that day to this I have never given her
another thought; I have not bestowed upon her so much as a sigh.
Of course, when it has been necessary to talk about her to
Leonora, or when for the purpose of these writings I have tried to
figure her out, I have thought about her as I might do about a
problem in algebra. But it has always been as a matter for study,
not for remembrance. She just went completely out of existence,
like yesterday's paper.
I was so deadly tired. And I dare say that my week or ten days of
affaissement--of what was practically catalepsy--was just the
repose that my exhausted nature claimed after twelve years of the
repression of my instincts, after twelve years of playing the
trained poodle. For that was all that I had been. I suppose that it
was the shock that did it--the several shocks. But I am unwilling
to attribute my feelings at that time to anything so concrete as a
shock. It was a feeling so tranquil. It was as if an immensely
heavy--an unbearably heavy knapsack, supported upon my
shoulders by straps, had fallen off and left my shoulders
themselves that the straps had cut into, numb and without
sensation of life. I tell you, I had no regret. What had I to regret? I
suppose that my inner soul--my dual personality--had realized
long before that Florence was a personality of paper--that she
represented a real human being with a heart, with feelings, with
sympathies and with emotions only as a bank-note represents a
certain quantity of gold. I know that sort of feeling came to the
surface in me the moment the man Bagshawe told me that he had
seen her coming out of that fellow's bedroom. I thought suddenly
that she wasn't real; she was just a mass of talk out of guidebooks,
of drawings out of fashion-plates. It is even possible that, if that
feeling had not possessed me, I should have run up sooner to her
room and might have prevented her drinking the prussic acid. But
I just couldn't do it; it would have been like chasing a scrap of
paper--an occupation ignoble for a grown man.
And, as it began, so that matter has remained. I didn't care whether
she had come out of that bedroom or whether she hadn't. It simply
didn't interest me. Florence didn't matter.
I suppose you will retort that I was in love with Nancy Rufford and
that my indifference was therefore discreditable. Well, I am not
seeking to avoid discredit. I was in love with Nancy Rufford as I
am in love with the poor child's memory, quietly and quite
tenderly in my American sort of way. I had never thought about it
until I heard Leonora state that I might now marry her. But, from
that moment until her worse than death, I do not suppose that I
much thought about anything else. I don't mean to say that I sighed
about her or groaned; I just wanted to marry her as some people
want to go to Carcassonne.
Do you understand the feeling--the sort of feeling that you must
get certain matters out of the way, smooth out certain fairly
negligible complications before you can go to a place that has,
during all your life, been a sort of dream city? I didn't attach much
importance to my superior years. I was forty-five, and she, poor
thing, was only just rising twenty-two. But she was older than her
years and quieter. She seemed to have an odd quality of sainthood,
as if she must inevitably end in a convent with a white coif
framing her face. But she had frequently told me that she had no
vocation; it just simply wasn't there--the desire to become a nun.
Well, I guess that I was a sort of convent myself; it seemed fairly
proper that she should make her vows to me. No, I didn't see any
impediment on the score of age. I dare say no man does and I was
pretty confident that with a little preparation, I could make a
young girl happy. I could spoil her as few young girls have ever
been spoiled; and I couldn't regard myself as personally repulsive.
No man can, or if he ever comes to do so, that is the end of him.
But, as soon as I came out of my catalepsy, I seemed to perceive
that my problem--that what I had to do to prepare myself for
getting into contact with her, was just to get back into contact
with life. I had been kept for twelve years in a rarefied
atmosphere; what I then had to do was a little fighting with real
life, some wrestling with men of business, some travelling
amongst larger cities, something harsh, something masculine. I
didn't want to present myself to Nancy Rufford as a sort of an old
maid. That was why, just a fortnight after Florence's suicide, I set
off for the United States.
Read next: PART III#CHAPTER II
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