Chapter 31 - Page 2

disenchantment. The worst of it was that he could never tell
when these hot gusts of anguish would overtake him. They came sometimes
just when he felt most secure, when he was saying to himself: "After
all, things are really worth while--" sometimes even when he was sitting
with Clare Van Degen, listening to her voice, watching her hands, and
turning over in his mind the opening chapters of his book.

"You ought to write"; they had one and all said it to him from the
first; and he fancied he might have begun sooner if he had not
been urged on by their watchful fondness. Everybody wanted him to
write--everybody had decided that he ought to, that he would, that
he must be persuaded to; and the incessant imperceptible pressure of
encouragement--the assumption of those about him that because it would
be good for him to write he must naturally be able to--acted on his
restive nerves as a stronger deterrent than disapproval.

Even Clare had fallen into the same mistake; and one day, as he sat
talking with her on the verandah of Laura Fairford's house on the
Sound--where they now most frequently met--Ralph had half-impatiently
rejoined: "Oh, if you think it's literature I need--!"

Instantly he had seen her face change, and the speaking hands tremble on
her knee. But she achieved the feat of not answering him, or turning her
steady eyes from the dancing mid-summer water at the foot of Laura's
lawn. Ralph leaned a little nearer, and for an instant his hand imagined
the flutter of hers. But instead of clasping it he drew back, and rising
from his chair wandered away to the other end of the verandah...No, he
didn't feel as Clare felt. If he loved her--as he sometimes thought he
did--it was not in the same way. He had a great tenderness for her, he
was more nearly happy with her than with any one else; he liked to sit
and talk with her, and watch her face and her hands, and he wished there
were some way--some different way--of letting her know it; but he could
not conceive that tenderness and desire could ever again be one for him:
such a notion as that seemed part of the monstrous sentimental muddle on
which his life had gone aground.

"I shall write--of course I shall write some day," he said, turning back
to his seat. "I've had a novel in the back of my head for years; and
now's the time to pull it out."

He hardly knew what he was saying; but before the end of the sentence he
saw that Clare had understood what he meant to convey, and henceforth he
felt committed to letting her talk to him as much as she pleased about
his book. He himself, in consequence, took to thinking about it more
consecutively; and just as his friends ceased to urge him to write, he