I
have often wondered how I should have felt on that five-hour journey back
to the city if she had fallen into my arms! I should have persuaded
myself, no doubt, that I had not done a foolish thing in yielding to an
impulse and proposing to an inexperienced and provincial young woman, yet
there would have been regrets in the background. Too deeply chagrined to
see any humour in the situation, I settled down in a Pullman seat and
went over and over again the event of that afternoon until the train
reached the city.

As the days wore on, and I attended to my cases, I thought of Maude a
great deal, and in those moments when the pressure of business was
relaxed, she obsessed me. She must love me,--only she did not realize it.
That was the secret! Her value had risen amazingly, become supreme; the
very act of refusing me had emphasized her qualifications as a wife, and
I now desired her with all the intensity of a nature which had been
permitted always to achieve its objects. The inevitable process of
idealization began. In dusty offices I recalled her freshness as she had
sat beside me in the garden,--the freshness of a flower; with Berkeleyan
subjectivism I clothed the flower with colour, bestowed it with
fragrance. I conferred on Maude all the gifts and graces that woman had
possessed since the creation. And I recalled, with mingled bitterness and
tenderness, the turn of her head, the down on her neck, the half-revealed
curve of her arm.... In spite of the growing sordidness of Lyme Street,
my mother and I still lived in the old house, for which she very
naturally had a sentiment. In vain I had urged her from time to time to
move out into a brighter and fresher neighbourhood. It would be time
enough, she said, when I was married.

"If you wait for that, mother," I answered, "we shall spend the rest of
our lives here."

"I shall spend the rest of my life here," she would declare. "But
you--you have your life before you, my dear. You would be so much more
contented if--if you could find some nice girl. I think you live--too
feverishly."

I do not know whether or not she suspected me of being in love, nor
indeed how much she read of me in other ways. I did not confide in her,
nor did it strike me that she might have yearned for confidences; though
sometimes, when I dined at home, I surprised her gentle face--framed now
with white hair--lifted wistfully toward me across the table. Our
relationship, indeed, was a patheti