England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Marriage -- Fiction
"No more it is. It needs---- No, I'm not going to be immoral any more.
Go ahead! You're made for double harness, Walter. Choose her well!
you'll have to learn her paces, you know."
"Or she mine?"
Blake was a little on his dignity again.
"Have another whisky and soda," said Caylesham, with admirable tact.
His advice, meant as precautionary, proved provocative. Memory worked
with it--the carking memory of a failure of courage. Blake might blarney
as he would about awakened conscience, but Caylesham had put his finger
on the sore spot. Pleasure's potentiality of tragedy had asserted
itself. It had been supremely disconcerting to discover and recognise
its existence. Young Blake was for morality now--not so much because its
eyes were turned upwards as for the blameless security of its embrace.
He had suffered such a scare. He really wondered how Caylesham had
managed to stand the strain of pleasing himself--with the sudden tragic
potentialities of it. He paid unwilling homage to the qualities
necessary for vice--for candid unmasquerading vice; he knew all about
the other species.
Yet he was not hard on Sibylla. He recognised her temperament, her
unhappy circumstances, and his own personal attractions. What he did not
recognise was the impression of himself which that night in the Sailors'
Rest would leave on her. He conceived an idea of his own magnanimity
resting in her mind--yes, though such a notion could gain no comfortable
footing in his.
Caylesham let him go without more advice--though he had half a mind to
tell him not to marry a pretty woman.
"Oh, well, in his present mood he won't; and it would do him lots of
good if he did," the impenitent, clear-sighted, good-humoured sinner
reflected, with all the meaning which his experience could put into the
words. He was of opinion that for certain people the only chance of
salvation lay in suffering gross injustice. "If what a fellow brings on
himself is injustice," he used to say. He always maintained that fellows
brought it on themselves--an expiring gasp of conscience, perhaps.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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