He saw clearly that she was telling the truth, and telling it too gently, when she said he was responsible for her having standards of living which she could not unaided hope to attain.  It is a dreadful thing to interfere in the destiny of a fellow being.  We do it all the time; we do it lightly.  Nevertheless, it is a dreadful thing—­not one that ought not to be done, but one that ought to be done only under imperative compulsion, and then with every precaution.  He had interfered in Dorothy Hallowell’s destiny.  He had lifted her out of the dim obscure niche where she was ensconced in comparative contentment.  He had lifted her up where she had seen and felt the pleasures of a life of luxury.

“But for me,” he said to himself, “she would now be marrying this poor young lawyer, or some chap of the same sort, and would be looking forward to a life of happiness in a little flat or suburban cottage.”

If she should refuse his offer—­what then?  Clearly he ought to do his best to help her to happiness with the other man.  He smiled cynically at the moral height to which his logic thus pointed the way.  Nevertheless, he did not turn away but surveyed it—­and there formed in his mind an impulse to make an effort to attempt that height, if Fate should rule against him with her.  “If I were a really decent man,” thought he, “I’d sit down now and write her that I would not marry her but would give her young man a friendly hand in the law if she wished to marry him.”  But he knew that such utter generosity was far beyond him.  “Only a hero could do it,” said he; he added with what a sentimentalist might have called a return of his normal cynicism, “only a hero who really in the bottom of his heart didn’t especially want the girl.”  And a candid person of experience might possibly admit that there was more truth than cynicism in his look askance at the grand army of martyrs of renunciation, most of whom have simply given up something they didn’t really want.

“If she accepts me, I’ll make it impossible for her not to be happy,” he said to himself, in all the fine unselfishness of passion—­not divine unselfishness but human—­not the kind we read about and pretend to have—­and get a savage attack of bruised vanity if we are accused of not having it—­no, but just the kind we have and show in our daily lives—­the unselfishness of longing to make happy those whom it would make us happier to see happy.  “She may think she cares for this young clerk—­” so ran his thoughts—­“but she doesn’t know her own mind.  When she is mine, I’ll take her in hand as a gardener does a delicate rare flower—­and, by Heaven, how I shall make her blossom and bloom!”

It would hardly be possible for a human being to pass a stormier night than was that night of his.  Alternations between hope and despair—­fantastic pictures of future with and without her, wild pleadings with her—­those delirious transports to which our imaginations give way if we happen to be blessed and cursed with imaginations—­in the security of the darkness and aloneness of night and bed.  And through it all he was tormented body and soul by her loveliness—­her hair, her skin, her eyes, the shy, slender graces of her form—­He tossed about until his bed was so wildly disheveled that he had to rise and remake it.