If you ask what the inward monitor was about on this occasion, I will
say that it is always and singularly inept at human estimates. If, often
in search of companionship, its eye is removed from the Mark, to fix
upon the personal environment, it is still unfurnished to divine behind
which plain exterior lives another like itself! I took Tommy's community
of interest for granted on the evidence of his loving me, though,
indeed, after all these years I am not quite clear why he, why Forester
and Pauline couldn't have walked in the way with me toward the Shining
Destiny. I was not conscious of any private advantage; certainly so far
as our beginnings were concerned, none showed, and I should have been
glad of their company ... and here at the end I am walking in it alone.
About a month after my engagement, Henry Mills proposed to Pauline, and
she began preparations to be married the following June. Tommy's salary
not being thought to justify it so soon, the idea of my own marriage had
not come very close to me until I began to help Pauline work initials on
table linen.
The chief difference between Pauline and me had been that she had lived
all her life, so to speak, at home; nothing exigent to her social order
had ever found her "out"; but Olivia seemed always to be at the top of
the house or somewhere in the back garden, to whom the normal occasions
presented themselves as a succession of cards under the door. I do not
mean to say that I actually missed any of these appointed visitors, but
all my early life comes back to me as a series of importunate callers
whose names I was not sure of, and who distracted me frightfully from
something vastly more pleasant and important that I wanted very much to
do, without knowing very well what it was. But it was in the long
afternoons when Pauline and I sat upstairs together sewing on our white
things that I began to take notice of the relation of what happened to
me to the things that went on inside, and to be intrigued away from the
Vision by the possibility of turning it into facts of line and colour
and suitability. It was the beginning of my realizing what came
afterward to be such a bitter and engrossing need with me, the need of
money.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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