p would surpass even
the blessedness of being together!'

"At that stage, I confess, the solid ground of my resistance began to
give way under me. It was not that my convictions were shaken, but that
she had swept me into a world whose laws were different, where one could
reach out in directions that the slave of gravity hasn't pictured. But
at the same time my opposition hardened from reason into instinct. I
knew it was her voice, and not her logic, that was unsettling me. I knew
that if she'd written out her thesis and sent it me by post I should
have made short work of it; and again the part of me which I called
by all the finest names: my chivalry, my unselfishness, my superior
masculine experience, cried out with one voice: 'You can't let a woman
use her graces to her own undoing--you can't, for her own sake, let her
eyes convince you when her reasons don't!'

"And then, abruptly, and for the first time, a doubt entered me: a
doubt of her perfect moral honesty. I don't know how else to describe
my feeling that she wasn't playing fair, that in coming to my house, in
throwing herself at my head (I called things by their names), she
had perhaps not so much obeyed an irresistible impulse as deeply,
deliberately reckoned on the dissolvent effect of her generosity, her
rashness and her beauty....

"From the moment that this mean doubt raised its head in me I was once
more the creature of all the conventional scruples: I was repeating,
before the looking-glass of my self-consciousness, all the stereotyped
gestures of the 'man of honour.'... Oh, the sorry figure I must have
cut! You'll understand my dropping the curtain on it as quickly as I
can....

"Yet I remember, as I made my point, being struck by its impressiveness.
I was suffering and enjoying my own suffering. I told her that, whatever
step we decided to take, I owed it to her to insist on its being taken
soberly, deliberately--

"('No: it's "advisedly," isn't it? Oh, I was thinking of the Marriage
Service,' she interposed with a faint laugh.)

"--that if I accepted, there, on the spot, her headlong beautiful gift
of herself, I should feel I had taken an unfair advantage of her, an
advantage which she would be justified in reproaching me with afterward;
that I was not afraid to tell her this because she was intelligent
enough to know that my scruples were the surest proof of the quality of
my love; that I refused to owe my happiness to an unconsidered impuls