"
This letter I addressed and stamped, and then, with a wry grimace which
I palmed off on myself (but not on Adolphus) as a cheerful smile, I went
out and dropped it into the post-box; after which I further deluded
myself by murmuring _Nunc dimittis_ and assuring myself that the
incident was now absolutely closed.
But, despite this comfortable assurance, I was, in the days that
followed, an exceedingly miserable young man. It is all very well to
write down troubles of this kind as trivial and sentimental. They are
nothing of the kind. When a man of an essentially serious nature has
found the one woman of all the world who fulfils his highest ideals of
womanhood, who is, in fact, a woman in ten thousand, to whom he has
given all that he has to give of love and worship, the sudden wreck of
all his hopes is no small calamity. And so I found it. Resign myself as
I would to the bitter reality, the ghost of the might-have-been haunted
me night and day, so that I spent my leisure wandering abstractedly
about the streets, always trying to banish thought and never for an
instant succeeding.
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