suspect in her. I want to tell you that particularly
because so I am made, so you are made, so most of us are made. There is
scarcely a high purpose in all the world that has no dwarfish footman at
its stirrup, no base intention over which there does not ride at least
the phantom of an angel.

Constantly in those days, it seems to me now, I was haunted by my own
imagination of Mary amiably reconciled to Justin, bearing him children,
forgetful of or repudiating all the sweetness, all the wonder and beauty
we had shared.... It was an unjust and ungenerous conception, I knew it
for a caricature even as I entertained it, and yet it tormented me. It
stung me like a spur. It kept me at work, and if I strayed into
indolence brought me back to work with a mind galled and bleeding....

Sec. 12

And I suppose it is mixed up with all this that I could not make love
easily and naturally to Rachel. I could not write love-letters to her.
There is a burlesque quality in these scruples, I know, seeing that I
was now resolved to marry her, but that is the quality, that is the
mixed texture of life. We overcome the greater things and are
conscience-stricken by the details.

I wouldn't, even at the price of losing her--and I was now passionately
anxious not to lose her--use a single phrase of endearment that did not
come out of me almost in spite of myself. At any rate I would not cheat
her. And my offer of marriage when at last I sent it to her from Chicago
was, as I remember it, almost business-like. I atoned soon enough for
that arid letter in ten thousand sweet words that came of themselves to
my lips. And she paid me at any rate in my own coin when she sent me her
answer by cable, the one word "Yes."

And indeed I was already in love with her long before I wrote. It was
only a dread of giving her a single undeserved cheapness that had held
me back so long. It was that and the perplexity that Mary still gripped
my feelings; my old love for her was there in my heart in spite of my
new passion for Rachel, it was blackened perhaps and ruined and changed
but it was there. It was as if a new crater burnt now in the ampler
circumference of an old volcano, which showed all the more desolate and
sorrowful and obsolete for the warm light of the new flames....

How impatiently I came home! Thoughts of England I had not dared to
think for three long years might now do what they would in me. I dreamt
of the Surrey Hills and the great woo