ill call this idealism. I will only add,
and I will give the last word in your defence, you alone know what
you are."

LIII.

As soon as Westover had posted his letter he began to blame himself for
it. He saw that the right and manly thing would have been to write to
Mrs. Vostrand, and tell her frankly what he thought of Durgin. Her folly,
her insincerity, her vulgarity, had nothing to do with the affair, so far
as he was concerned. If she had once been so kind to him as to bind him
to her in grateful friendship, she certainly had a claim upon his best
offices. His duty was to her, and not at all to Durgin. He need not have
said anything against him because it was against him, but because it was
true; and if he had written he must not have said anything less than the
truth.

He could have chosen not to write at all. He could have said that her
mawkish hypocrisy was a little too much; that she was really wanting him
to whitewash Durgin for her, and she had no right to put upon him the
responsibility for the step she clearly wished to take. He could have
made either of these decisions, and defended them to himself; but in what
he had done he had altogether shirked. While he was writing to Durgin,
and pretending that he could justly leave this affair to him, he was
simply indulging a bit of sentimental pose, far worse than anything in
Mrs. Vostrand's sham appeal for his help.

He felt, as the time went by, that she had not written of her own
impulse, but at her daughter's urgence, and that it was this poor
creature whose trust he had paltered with. He believed that Durgin would
not fail to make her unhappy, yet he had not done what he might to
deliver her out of his hand. He had satisfied a wretched
pseudo-magnanimity toward a faithless scoundrel, as he thought Durgin, at
the cost of a woman whose anxious hope of his aid had probably forced her
mother's hand.

At first he thought his action irrevocable, and he bitterly upbraided
himself for not taking council with Cynthia upon Mrs. Vostrand's letter.
He had thought of doing that, and then he had dismissed the thought as
involving pain that he had no right to inflict; but now he perceived that
the pain was such as she must suffer in the event, and that he had
stupidly refused himself the only means of finding out the right thing to
do. Her true heart and her clear mind would have been infallible in the
affair, and he had trusted to his own muddled impulse.