e;
that we must see each other again, in her own house, in less agitating
circumstances, when she had had time to reflect on my words, to study
her heart and look into the future....

"The factitious exhilaration produced by uttering these beautiful
sentiments did not last very long, as you may imagine. It fell, little
by little, under her quiet gaze, a gaze in which there was neither
contempt nor irony nor wounded pride, but only a tender wistfulness of
interrogation; and I think the acutest point in my suffering was reached
when she said, as I ended: 'Oh; yes, of course I understand.'

"'If only you hadn't come to me here!' I blurted out in the torture of
my soul.

"She was on the threshold when I said it, and she turned and laid her
hand gently on mine. 'There was no other way,' she said; and at the
moment it seemed to me like some hackneyed phrase in a novel that she
had used without any sense of its meaning.

"I don't remember what I answered or what more we either of us said. At
the end a desperate longing to take her in my arms and keep her with me
swept aside everything else, and I went up to her, pleading, stammering,
urging I don't know what.... But she held me back with a quiet look,
and went. I had ordered the carriage, as she asked me to; and my last
definite recollection is of watching her drive off in the rain....

"I had her promise that she would see me, two days later, at her house
in town, and that we should then have what I called 'a decisive talk';
but I don't think that even at the moment I was the dupe of my phrase. I
knew, and she knew, that the end had come...."

V

"It was about that time (Merrick went on after a long pause) that I
definitely decided not to sell the Works, but to stick to my job and
conform my life to it.

"I can't describe to you the rage of conformity that possessed me.
Poetry, ideas--all the picture-making processes stopped. A kind of dull
self-discipline seemed to me the only exercise worthy of a reflecting
mind. I _had_ to justify my great refusal, and I tried to do it by
plunging myself up to the eyes into the very conditions I had been
instinctively struggling to get away from. The only possible consolation
would have been to find in a life of business routine and social
submission such moral compensations as may reward the citizen if they
fail the man; but to attain to these I should have had to accept the
old delusion that the social and the individual