Her letters to me were simple enough, written in a roundish, unformed hand and badly phrased.  Her first two or three showed a shy pleasure in the use of the word “dear,” and I remember being first puzzled and then, when I understood, delighted, because she had written “Willie Asthore” under my name.  “Asthore,” I gathered, meant “darling.”  But when the evidences of my fermentation began, her answers were less happy.

I will not weary you with the story of how we quarreled in our silly youthful way, and how I went the next Sunday, all uninvited, to Checkshill, and made it worse, and how afterward I wrote a letter that she thought was “lovely,” and mended the matter.  Nor will I tell of all our subsequent fluctuations of misunderstanding.  Always I was the offender and the final penitent until this last trouble that was now beginning; and in between we had some tender near moments, and I loved her very greatly.  There was this misfortune in the business, that in the darkness, and alone, I thought with great intensity of her, of her eyes, of her touch, of her sweet and delightful presence, but when I sat down to write I thought of Shelley and Burns and myself, and other such irrelevant matters.  When one is in love, in this fermenting way, it is harder to make love than it is when one does not love at all.  And as for Nettie, she loved, I know, not me but those gentle mysteries.  It was not my voice should rouse her dreams to passion. . .  So our letters continued to jar.  Then suddenly she wrote me one doubting whether she could ever care for any one who was a Socialist and did not believe in Church, and then hard upon it came another note with unexpected novelties of phrasing.  She thought we were not suited to each other, we differed so in tastes and ideas, she had long thought of releasing me from our engagement.  In fact, though I really did not apprehend it fully at the first shock, I was dismissed.  Her letter had reached me when I came home after old Rawdon’s none too civil refusal to raise my wages.  On this particular evening of which I write, therefore, I was in a state of feverish adjustment to two new and amazing, two nearly overwhelming facts, that I was neither indispensable to Nettie nor at Rawdon’s.  And to talk of comets!

Where did I stand?

I had grown so accustomed to think of Nettie as inseparably mine—­the whole tradition of “true love” pointed me to that—­that for her to face about with these precise small phrases toward abandonment, after we had kissed and whispered and come so close in the little adventurous familiarities of the young, shocked me profoundly.  I!  I!  And Rawdon didn’t find me indispensable either.  I felt I was suddenly repudiated by the universe and threatened with effacement, that in some positive and emphatic way I must at once assert myself.  There was no balm in the religion I had learnt, or in the irreligion I had adopted, for wounded self-love.

Should I fling up Rawdon’s place at once and then in some extraordinary, swift manner make the fortune of Frobisher’s adjacent and closely competitive pot-bank?