I have no delicacy? No
regard for your feelings? Oh, if I had had less! I doubt whether
you can even understand some of the considerations that weighed
with me, and made me cowardly--though I once thought there was no
refinement of sensibility that you couldn't enter into. Yes, I
was absurd enough to say to myself: "It will look as if I had
consciously deceived her; she may suffer from the thought that I
won her at all hazards, knowing that I should soon expose her to
poverty and all sorts of humiliation." Impossible to speak of
that again; I had to struggle desperately on, trying to hope. Oh!
if you knew--'
His voice gave way for an instant.
'I don't understand how you could be so thoughtless and
heartless. You knew that I was almost mad with anxiety at times.
Surely, any woman must have had the impulse to give what help was
in her power. How could you hesitate? Had you no suspicion of
what a relief and encouragement it would be to me, if you said:
"Yes, we must go and live in a simpler way?" If only as a proof
that you loved me, how I should have welcomed that! You helped me
in nothing.
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