gambling with it
for ten blasted days. Any other man would have gone clean off his chump
with worrying over it. There've been times when I've felt like it myself.
It was infernal--when you think what I stood to lose."

I said that was all rot. It was his beastly egoism. He didn't stand to
lose more than I did.

He said it wasn't a question of more or less. And it wasn't his egoism.
It was his sweetness and his heart-rending humility. He'd stood to lose
everything. He'd be done for if Viola wouldn't have him. He couldn't look
at any other woman after her. And he put it to me: What other woman would
look at him? Whereas my resources were practically inexhaustible. Almost
any nice woman would know that I would give her what she wanted. And
almost any nice woman would give me what I wanted, too. When I insisted
that I didn't see it, he said I'd see it shortly. He gave me six months.

Viola, he declared, would never have given me what I wanted. I could
never give her what she wanted. And he could.

He said he admitted that it was odd that he should be able to succeed
where I failed; but so it was, and he went on to expound to me all the
reasons for my failure.

"To begin with, you're not her sort; or, rather, you're too much her
sort. You with your integrity are one of the beautiful works of God, and
she's been used to that sort of beauty all her life and she's tired of
it. But she isn't used to me. She never will be. She's never seen
anything in the least like me before, and she never will see anything
quite like me again as long as she lives. I'm the queer, unexpected thing
she wants and always will want.

"But let that pass.

"You couldn't get her because you didn't give your mind to it. You didn't
know how to get her and you didn't try to find out. You set about it the
wrong way. I told you ages ago that a man's a fool if he wants a thing
and doesn't find out how to get it. You should have begun by trying to
find out something about _her_. But you didn't try. With all your
opportunities you haven't found out anything. You don't know the least
thing about her. You don't know what she wants, you don't know what she's
thinking, or what she's feeling, or what she'll do--how she'll behave if
you propose to her three times running. She's told you things and you
haven't understood them or tried to understand. Because the whole blessed
time you were thinking about yourself, or what she was thinking about
you, or was goi