Nobody is conscious how far he has been in dreamland till he is awakened. I was now fully aroused to the fact that I was in love with Eva Van Arsdel, to all intents and purposes, so much in love as made the nourishing and cherishing of an intimate friendship an impossibility, and only a specious cloak for a sort of moral dishonesty. Now I might have known this fact in the beginning, and I scolded and lectured myself for my own folly in not confessing it to myself before. I had been received by the family as a friend. I had been trusted with their chief treasure, with the understanding that it was to belong not to me but another, and there was a species of moral indelicacy to my mind in having suffered myself to become fascinated by her as I now felt that I was. But I did not feel adequate to congratulating her as the betrothed bride of another man; nay, more, when I looked back on the kind of intimate and confidential relations that had been growing up between us, I could not but feel that it was not safe for me to continue them. Two natures cannot exactly accord, cannot keep time and tune together, without being conscious of the fact and without becoming necessary to each other; and such relations in their very nature tend to grow absorbing and exclusive. It was plain to me that if Eva were to marry Wat Sydney I could not with honor and safety continue the kind of intimacy we had been so thoughtlessly and so delightfully enjoying for the past few weeks. But how to break it off without an explanation, and how make that explanation? There is a certain responsibility resting on a man of conscience and honor, about accepting all that nearness of access, and that closeness of intimacy which the ignorant innocence of young girls often invites. From his very nature, from his education, from his position in society, a young man knows more of what the full significance and requirements of marriage are to be than a young woman can, and he must know the danger of absorbing and exclusive intimacy with other than a husband. The instincts of every man teach that marriage must be engrossing and monopolizing, that it implies a forsaking of all others, and a keeping unto one only; and how could that be when every taste and feeling, every idiosyncracy and individual peculiarity made the society of some other person more agreeable? Without undue personal vanity, a man will surely know when there is a special congeniality of nature between himself and a certain woman, and he is bound in conscience and honor to look ahead in all his intimacies and see what must be the inevitable result of them according to the laws of the human mind. Because I had neglected this caution, because I had yielded myself blindly to the delicious enchantment of a new enthusiasm, I had now come to a place where I knew neither how to advance nor recede.