rouble
that was now beginning; and in between we had some tender near
moments, and I loved her very greatly. There was this misfortune
in the business, that in the darkness, and alone, I thought with
great intensity of her, of her eyes, of her touch, of her sweet
and delightful presence, but when I sat down to write I thought of
Shelley and Burns and myself, and other such irrelevant matters.
When one is in love, in this fermenting way, it is harder to make
love than it is when one does not love at all. And as for Nettie,
she loved, I know, not me but those gentle mysteries. It was not
my voice should rouse her dreams to passion. . . So our letters
continued to jar. Then suddenly she wrote me one doubting whether
she could ever care for any one who was a Socialist and did not
believe in Church, and then hard upon it came another note with
unexpected novelties of phrasing. She thought we were not suited
to each other, we differed so in tastes and ideas, she had long
thought of releasing me from our engagement. In fact, though I really
did not apprehend it fully at the first shock, I was dismissed.
Her letter had reached me when I came home after old Rawdon's none
too civil refusal to raise my wages. On this particular evening of
which I write, therefore, I was in a state of feverish adjustment
to two new and amazing, two nearly overwhelming facts, that I was
neither indispensable to Nettie nor at Rawdon's. And to talk of
comets!

Where did I stand?

I had grown so accustomed to think of Nettie as inseparably
mine--the whole tradition of "true love" pointed me to that--that
for her to face about with these precise small phrases toward
abandonment, after we had kissed and whispered and come so close
in the little adventurous familiarities of the young, shocked me
profoundly. I! I! And Rawdon didn't find me indispensable either.
I felt I was suddenly repudiated by the universe and threatened
with effacement, that in some positive and emphatic way I must at
once assert myself. There was no balm in the religion I had learnt,
or in the irreligion I had adopted, for wounded self-love.

Should I fling up Rawdon's place at once and then in some extraordinary,
swift manner make the fortune of Frobisher's adjacent and closely
competitive pot-bank?

The first part of that program, at any rate, would be easy of
accomplishment, to go to Rawdon and say, "You will hear from me
again," but for the rest, Frobisher might fail me. Th