He asked me what he had better do. Should he continue
to struggle with his reluctance to communicate his feelings to her;
should he endeavour to make her acquiesce in altered relations; should
he tell her frankly what had happened; or should he--he confessed that
he would prefer this himself--arrange for a virtual separation? "I
feel," he said, "that I have lost the only thing in the world I really
care about--my liberty." It sounds, as I thus describe the situation,
as though my friend was acting in an entirely selfish and cold-blooded
manner; but I confess that it did not strike me in that light at the
time. He spoke in a mood of dreary melancholy, as a man might speak who
had committed a great mistake, and felt himself unequal to the
responsibilities he had assumed. He spoke of his wife with a deep
compassionateness, as though intensely alive to the sorrow that he had
inconsiderately inflicted upon her. He condemned himself unsparingly,
and said frankly that he had known all the time that he was doing wrong
in allowing himself to be carried away by his passion. "I hoped," he
said, "that it might have been the awakening of a new life in me, and
that it would be an initiation for me into the inner life of the world,
from which I had always been excluded." He went on to say that he would
make any sacrifice he could for her happiness--adding gravely, looking
at me with a strange air, that if he thought that she would be the
happier if he killed himself, he would not hesitate to do it.
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