I had known Evie Soames for close on five years; and though I had loved her ever since the days when, with her skirt neither short nor long, and her hair neither loose nor yet properly revealing the shape of her slender and birch-like nape, she and I had attended the same Business College in Holborn, it had been only during the last six months that we had become engaged. On either of our parts a former engagement had ended abruptly; and this, for her sake at least, was the reason why I would gladly have had her anywhere but at Guildford that Sunday morning.
For it had been to the late Mrs Merridew's son that she had been engaged, and the affair had terminated with tragical suddenness indeed. You cannot but call it tragical when a young man is discovered, on his wedding morning, hanging by the neck from a hook in his bedroom door, with a letter in his pocket that only partly sets forth his reason for taking his life, leaving the rest for the medical evidence to determine--and then to be kept for very pity from his womenfolk. Yet this had happened four years before; and it was because I dreaded to revive the memory of it, and especially to revive the memories of those subsequent days when Evie must have tormented herself with vain and fruitless guessings at what a coroner and a jury-panel and a doctor in Store Street had smothered up among themselves, that I walked brooding and with downhung head.
And about women generally I had better confess myself at once as, past praying for, a Philistine. I subscribe to nothing whatever that this New Man so strangely risen in our midst nowadays appears to hold about the ancient and changeless feminine. And I take it that most men not profligates or fools will understand me when I say that I think there are some things that it is worse than useless that women should know, and that this sordid four-year-old business was one of them. To those born to knowledge, knowledge will come; the others will never know, no matter what the facts of their experience may be. Oh, I had seen these weak and vainglorious vessels go to Life's Niagara before, thinking to fill themselves at it--and had seen the flinders into which they had been dashed. Therefore I had deliberately resolved to stand between Evie Soames and many things. I ever thought of her as a flower, a flower of dewy flesh, joining its fragrance to that of the morning of her mind; and though I knew that that too lovely stage must quickly pass, perhaps into something better, I could never think of that passing unmoved. I was prepared to fight for a last--and perhaps impossible--protection of it. There was much knowledge that I would take on myself for the pair of us; a few more of life's weals and scars would make no difference to me.... And if you tell me that this was merely a foredoomed attempt to keep from her the knowledge of the world into which she had been born, very well: I accept the responsibility of that. At any rate, she might find what fantastic explanations she would of the mystery that I and the jury and a doctor in Store Street could have explained. I would open no door to admit her to horrors which would haunt her for ever though I closed it again in a flash.