"I did though. It was the day I saw you at Lincoln," he continued. "Ihad meant to ask her to marry me, and then I looked out of the window and saw you. After that I didn't want to ask any one to marry me. But I did it; and she knew I was lying, and refused me. I thought then, and still think, that she cares for me. I behaved very badly. I don't defend myself.""No," said Katharine, "I should hope not. There's no defence that Ican think of. If any conduct is wrong, that is." She spoke with an energy that was directed even more against herself than against him.
"It seems to me," she continued, with the same energy, "that people are bound to be honest. There's no excuse for such behavior." She could now see plainly before her eyes the expression on Mary Datchet's face.
After a short pause, he said:
"I am not telling you that I am in love with you. I am not in love with you.""I didn't think that," she replied, conscious of some bewilderment.
"I have not spoken a word to you that I do not mean," he added.
"Tell me then what it is that you mean," she said at length.
As if obeying a common instinct, they both stopped and, bending slightly over the balustrade of the river, looked into the flowing water.
"You say that we've got to be honest," Ralph began. "Very well. I will try to tell you the facts; but I warn you, you'll think me mad. It's a fact, though, that since I first saw you four or five months ago Ihave made you, in an utterly absurd way, I expect, my ideal. I'm almost ashamed to tell you what lengths I've gone to. It's become the thing that matters most in my life." He checked himself. "Without knowing you, except that you're beautiful, and all that, I've come to believe that we're in some sort of agreement; that we're after something together; that we see something. . . . I've got into the habit of imagining you; I'm always thinking what you'd say or do; Iwalk along the street talking to you; I dream of you. It's merely a bad habit, a schoolboy habit, day-dreaming; it's a common experience;half one's friends do the same; well, those are the facts."Simultaneously, they both walked on very slowly.
"If you were to know me you would feel none of this," she said. "We don't know each other--we've always been--interrupted. . . . Were you going to tell me this that day my aunts came?" she asked, recollecting the whole scene.
He bowed his head.
"The day you told me of your engagement," he said.
She thought, with a start, that she was no longer engaged.
"I deny that I should cease to feel this if I knew you," he went on.
"I should feel it more reasonably--that's all. I shouldn't talk the kind of nonsense I've talked to-night. . . . But it wasn't nonsense.
It was the truth," he said doggedly. "It's the important thing. You can force me to talk as if this feeling for you were an hallucination, but all our feelings are that. The best of them are half illusions.
Still," he added, as if arguing to himself, "if it weren't as real a feeling as I'm capable of, I shouldn't be changing my life on your account.""What do you mean?" she inquired.
"I told you. I'm taking a cottage. I'm giving up my profession.""On my account?" she asked, in amazement.
"Yes, on your account," he replied. He explained his meaning no further.
"But I don't know you or your circumstances," she said at last, as he remained silent.
"You have no opinion about me one way or the other?""Yes, I suppose I have an opinion--" she hesitated.
He controlled his wish to ask her to explain herself, and much to his pleasure she went on, appearing to search her mind.
"I thought that you criticized me--perhaps disliked me. I thought of you as a person who judges--""No; I'm a person who feels," he said, in a low voice.
"Tell me, then, what has made you do this?" she asked, after a break.
