can never by any
possibility be a fit companion for you. I have seen such marriages; I
have seen the beginning of them and the end. You, least of all men,
should fall into such an error. Oh yes, I know; you are not brutal; you
would never as much as speak an unkind word. No, but you would do what
in this case would be worse. Brutally treated, Thyrza would die and be
out of her misery; with you, she would drag through years of increasing
wretchedness. Your thwarted life would be her long torture. Remember
how often I have told you that you have much that is feminine in your
character. You have little real energy; you are passive in great
trials; it is easier to you to suffer than to act. Your idealism is
often noble, but never heroic. You have talked to me of your natural
nearness to people of the working class, and I firmly believe that you
are further from them--for any such purpose as this in question--than
many a man who counts kindred among the peerage. You have a great deal
of spiritual pride, and it will increase as your mind matures. You
think you _are_ mature; tell me in ten years (if I am alive, old woman
that I am!) how you look back on your present self. Walter Egremont, if
ever you ask Thyrza to marry you, you will be acting with cruel
selfishness--yes, selfishness, for all that you would pay bitterly for
it in the end. You will be acting in a way utterly unworthy of a man
who has studied and reflected.'

Thyrza heard Egremont laugh.

'To hear all this from you,' he said, 'surprises me very much.'

'You credit me with so little power of mind?'

'I thought you were the last to talk the common talk of the world that
has outlived its generous instincts.'

'Pray believe that there is such a thing as outliving youthful passion,
and yet retaining all the generous feeling that you speak of. I am not
an ignoble schemer, and you know that I am not. Think over my arguments
before you scorn me.'

'You think me so boyish and weak-minded that I cannot distinguish
between pure love and base? One thing I left out of my narrative just
now. I ought to have said that I was _not_ wholly without blame in that
intercourse. I strove with myself to seem nothing more than friendly to
her, and yet I know that at times I spoke as no mere friend would have
done, and simply because I could not help it. I loved Thyrza even then
with more intensity of pure feeling than I had ever before known, and
now I love her with a love which