ery stillness of the evening, the air of
preparation for repose, the first faint suggestions of the passage from
summer to autumn, all had some effect of pervading melancholy. I found
myself speculating on the promise of change that my talk with Anne had
foreshadowed; of the uprooting of Farmer Banks, of the family's
emigration, and the sadness of their farewells to this exquisitely
peaceful country of England.

And then the thought that I had unconsciously feared and repressed since I
had left the farm, broke through all these artificial abstractions and
forced itself upon my attention. I struggled against it vainly for a few
seconds and then braced myself to meet the realisation of my own failure.
For it was that shadow which had been stalking me since Anne had so
obliquely criticised my comedy. And it seemed to me now that her last
strange expression as she left the room, that look of pity and regret, had
all too surely indicated the certainty that she--I faced it with a kind of
bitter despair--that she despised me. I was "well-off." I belonged to the
Jervaises' class. She had flung those charges at me contemptuously before
she had finally dismissed my one futile claim to distinction by classing
me among the writers of that artificial English comedy which had not even
the redeeming virtue of wit.

Not once in that long conversation with her had she shown the sudden spark
of recognition that had so wonderfully lighted my parting with her in the
night. She had given me her confidence about her family affairs because
she counted me as a new ally, however ineffective, coming in unexpectedly
to fight against the Jervaises. She had acknowledged my worship of her
because she was too clear-sighted and too honest to shirk my inevitable
declaration. But I could not doubt that she rated me as unworthy of her
serious attention. Her whole attitude proclaimed that her one instant of
reaching out towards me had been a mistake; one of the many impulses that
continually blossomed and died in her close intercourse with the spirit of
life.

And I could not blame her for her contempt of me. I despised myself. I was
a man without a serious interest. I had escaped vice, but I had always
lived among surface activities. My highest ambition after I left Cambridge
had been to have one of my foolish plays mounted in a West-End theatre. I
had wanted to be talked about, to be a social success. And I had achieved
that ambition without much diff