I: Susan! Is that all? Is it really all that's holding you from me? Good God, dear! Why, I thought you--secretly--perhaps even unknown to yourself--loved Jimmy!
I: I think so even now. How can I help it? Look.... [And here you must suppose me to show her those first scrawled sheets, written automatically by her hand.] Perhaps I'm revealing your own heart to you, Susan--dragging to light what you've tried to keep hidden even from yourself. See, dear. "A net. No means of escape from it. To escape--somehow. Jimmy----"
[And then Susan would perhaps have handed back those scrawled pages to me with a pitying and pitiful smile.]
[_Author's Note_: This carefully written, imaginary speech has been deleted _in toto_ by Censor Susan from the page proof--at considerable expense to me--and the following authentic confession substituted for it in her own hand. But she doesn't know I am making this explanation, which will account to you for the form and manner of her confession, purposely designed to be a continuation of my own imaginary flight. In admitting this, I am risking Susan's displeasure; but conscience forbids me to let you mistake a "genuine human document"--so dear to the modern heart--for a mere effort at interpretation by an amateur psychologist. What follows, then, is veracious, is essentially that solemn thing so dear to a truth-loving generation--sheer _fact_.]
Ambo dear, I can explain that, but not without a long, unhappy confession. Must I? It's a shadowy, inside-of-me story, awfully mixed and muddled; not a nice story at all. Won't it be better, all round, if I simply say again that I love _you_, not Jimmy, with all my heart?
[No doubt I should then have reached for her hands, and she would have drawn away.]
Ah, no, dear, please not! I've never made a clean breast of it all, even to myself. It's got to be done, though, Ambo, sooner or later, for both our sakes. Be patient with me. I'll begin at the beginning.
I'm ridiculously young, Ambo; we all keep forgetting how young I am! I'm an infant prodigy, really; you and Phil--and God first, I suppose--have made me so. And the main point about infant prodigies is that experience hasn't caught up with them. They live in things they've imagined from things they've been told or read, live on intuition and second-hand ideas; and they've no means of testing their real values in a real world. And they're childishly conceited, Ambo! I am. Less now than some months ago; but I'm still pretty bad....