the woman who continues to inspire passion continues to inspire
tenderness and considerateness.
So when Norman left Dorothy that Sunday afternoon, he, being a normal if
sore beset human being, was soon in the throes of an agonized remorse.
There may have been some hypocrisy in it, some struggling to cover up
the baser elements in his infatuation for her. What human emotion of
upward tendency has not at least a little of the varnish of hypocrisy on
certain less presentable spots in it? But in the main it was a
creditable, a manly remorse, and not altogether the writhings of
jealousy and jealous fear of losing her.
He saw clearly that she was telling the truth, and telling it too
gently, when she said he was responsible for her having standards of
living which she could not unaided hope to attain. It is a dreadful
thing to interfere in the destiny of a fellow being. We do it all the
time; we do it lightly. Nevertheless, it is a dreadful thing--not one
that ought not to be done, but one that ought to be done only under
imperative compulsion, and then with every precaution. He had interfered
in Dorothy Hallowell's destiny. He had lifted her out of the dim obscure
niche where she was ensconced in comparative contentment. He had lifted
her up where she had seen and felt the pleasures of a life of luxury.
"But for me," he said to himself, "she would now be marrying this poor
young lawyer, or some chap of the same sort, and would be looking
forward to a life of happiness in a little flat or suburban cottage."
If she should refuse his offer--what then? Clearly he ought to do his
best to help her to happiness with the other man. He smiled cynically at
the moral height to which his logic thus pointed the way. Nevertheless,
he did not turn away but surveyed it--and there formed in his mind an
impulse to make an effort to attempt that height, if Fate should rule
against him with her. "If I were a really decent man," thought he, "I'd
sit down now and write her that I would not marry her but would give her
young man a friendly hand in the law if she wished to marry him." But he
knew that such utter generosity was far beyond him. "Only a hero could
do it," said he; he added with what a sentimentalist might have called a
return of his normal cynicism, "only a hero who really in the bottom of
his heart didn't especially want the girl." And a candid person of
experience might possibly admit that there was more truth than cynicism
in his look askance at the grand army of martyrs of renunciation, most
of whom have simply given up something they didn't really want.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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