A letter from Marcella—­written before she had received either of his—­reached him at the House just before he started for his meeting.  A touching letter!—­yet with a certain resolution in it which disconcerted him.

“Forget, if you will, everything that you said to me last night.  It might be—­I believe it would be—­best for us both.  But if you will not—­if I must give my answer, then, as I said, I must have time.  It is only quite recently that I have realised the enormity of what I did last year.  I must run no risks of so wrenching my own life—­or another’s—­a second time.  Not to be sure is for me torment.  Why perfect simplicity of feeling—­which would scorn the very notion of questioning itself—­seems to be beyond me, I do not know.  That it is so fills me with a sort of shame and bitterness.  But I must follow my nature.

“So let me think it out.  I believe you know, for one thing, that your ‘cause,’ your life-work, attracts me strongly.  I should not any longer accept all you say, as I did last year.  But mere opinion matters infinitely less to me than it did.  I can imagine now agreeing with a friend ‘in everything except opinion.’  All that would matter to me now would be to feel that your heart was wholly in your work, in your public acts, so that I might still admire and love all that I might differ from.  But there—­for we must be frank with each other—­is just my difficulty. Why do you do so many contradictory things?  Why do you talk of the poor, of labour, of self-denial, and live whenever you can with the idle rich people, who hate all three in their hearts?  You talk their language; you scorn what they scorn, or so it seems; you accept their standards.  Oh!—­to the really ‘consecrate’ in heart and thought I could give my life so easily, so slavishly even!  There is no one weaker than I in the world.  I must have strength to lean upon—­and a strength, pure at the core, that I can respect and follow.

“Here in this nursing life of mine, I go in and out among people to the best of whom life is very real and simple—­and often, of course, very sad.  And I am another being in it from what I was at Lady Winterbourne’s.  Everything looks differently to me.  No, no! you must please wait till the inner voice speaks so that I can hear it plainly—­for your sake at least as much as for mine.  If you persisted in coming to see me now, I should have to put an end to it all.”

“Strange is the modern woman!” thought Wharton to himself, not without sharp pique, as he pondered that letter in the course of his drive home from the meeting.  “I talk to her of passion, and she asks me in return why I do things inconsistent with my political opinions! puts me through a moral catechism, in fact!  What is the meaning of it all—­confound it! —­her state of mind and mine?  Is the good old ars amandi perishing out of the world?  Let some Stendhal come and tell us why!”