IMMONS never went into the writing-room of the club; the association was too painful. But to-night, with the courage born of an approaching crisis, he came and stood a moment in the doorway, and looked at the corner writing-table. There, two years ago, with the help of that spotless blotting-paper, with those clean gray pens, looking out over these same housetops from the windows of this quiet upper room, he had committed one of those blunders which are as unexpected, as illogical, and as irretrievable as death.
He had written two letters:
": You are quite wrong in thinking me such a narrow-minded bachelor that I cannot see that for some men with the right sort of woman, marriage is the best sort of life. I hope it may be so for you.
And then, drawing a larger sheet to him, he had written:
": If a fellow wrote to tell you that he was the victim of a slow disease, now in its incipient stages, which would eventually blind him and deafen him, and keep him confined to one small, ill-furnished room, no one would expect you to write him a letter of congratulation. Yet this is what I have just had to do. The best friend I have in the world is going to be married, and, ye gods! to such a woman! If I saw her now for the first time I should probably think her a perfect mate, and envy my friend his future; for she is young, beautiful, virtuous, rich, well-born. But unhappily she happens to be my cousin. I have watched her grow up, and I know that those clear blue eyes of hers see only one thing, and that is on which side the lovely Gertrude's bread is buttered; that her ears hear nothing but what it pleases her to hear. I know one might as well try to roll water into a ball as to influence her sweet docility to do anything it does not want to do. She can be generous, but she cannot admit an obligation. She can be kind, but the world must hear of it. I have known her sit up all night to nurse a sick servant; and a few days after, because the woman was not sufficiently grateful, give her a reference that would keep her out of work for the rest of her life. My friend will prosper. He will soon begin to find himself knowing the people it will be of advantage to him to know, and, even more important, strange impalpable obstacles will intervene between him and those of us who are of no use. Perhaps you will say that this woman must at least have brains. You will be wrong. This is something more effective and dangerous than brains; it is egotism. No mind could conceive such subtle plans as the egotist instinctively and almost unconsciously carries out. No intelligent villain would dare to stoop as low as the successful self-deceiver. There never was such a protection against having anything brought home to you as to be perfectly self-deprecatory in speech, and perfectly self-righteous at heart.
"Within a few years one of two things will happen. Either my friend will learn to understand her and loathe her in his good, honest soul; or else he will adopt her point of view and speak her language. He will justify her, as men do who marry liars, by saying that we must not expect so high a standard of honor from women as we do from men. He will say, as men do who have deliberately chosen fools, that the last thing in the world he desires in a wife is intellectual companionship; and he will tell me that woman is an ideal being living in a mist on a mountain-top, as all men do who dare not subject the women they love to the simplest tests of reality. Some men, of course, can live in a cloud too, but I don't think this one can. With an unusually considerate and affectionate nature, he combines an excessively keen and relentless judgment. He never went in much for the analysis of character, but I used to notice, even when we were at college, that in a critical moment he understood men more wisely and more precisely than we, who thought we were more psychological.
"Oh, Wickes, only the blind can say it makes no difference whom a man marries. Does it make no difference in the first place whom he chooses? And after that, the question is merely whether he repudiates his debts or ruins himself in paying them.
"I never was glad before that you had settled ten thousand miles away, but it is almost like writing to the dead. Good-night,
Having written without pausing, he first hesitated whether to send the letter at all, and then, in contempt of all hesitation, he gathered them both up, folded, directed, and posted them, and realized an hour afterward that he had interchanged the envelopes. He was in the smoking-room when his memory gave him back the picture of his mistake, and a minute later he heard Mark's voice at his elbow, saying pleasantly:
"I thought I might find you here."