‘Have you made efforts to find her?’ Mrs. Ormonde at length asked.

‘Every possible effort.’

‘With what purpose?’

’Need I tell you?

’You think it is your duty to offer her reparation for what she has suffered, because you were unwillingly the cause of it?’

’Yes, if that is the same thing as saying that I love her, and that I wish to make her my wife.’

’In a sense I suppose it is the same thing.  You have been compelled to think so much of her, that pity and a desire to do your best for an unhappy girl have come to seem love.  Remember that, by your own admission, you are ill; you cannot judge soundly of anything, even of your own feelings.  You have done a good deal of harm, Walter, though unintentionally; do you wish to do yet more?’

‘How?’

’By binding yourself for life to a poor girl who can never by any possibility be a fit companion for you.  I have seen such marriages; I have seen the beginning of them and the end.  You, least of all men, should fall into such an error.  Oh yes, I know; you are not brutal; you would never as much as speak an unkind word.  No, but you would do what in this case would be worse.  Brutally treated, Thyrza would die and be out of her misery; with you, she would drag through years of increasing wretchedness.  Your thwarted life would be her long torture.  Remember how often I have told you that you have much that is feminine in your character.  You have little real energy; you are passive in great trials; it is easier to you to suffer than to act.  Your idealism is often noble, but never heroic.  You have talked to me of your natural nearness to people of the working class, and I firmly believe that you are further from them—­for any such purpose as this in question—­than many a man who counts kindred among the peerage.  You have a great deal of spiritual pride, and it will increase as your mind matures.  You think you are mature; tell me in ten years (if I am alive, old woman that I am!) how you look back on your present self.  Walter Egremont, if ever you ask Thyrza to marry you, you will be acting with cruel selfishness—­yes, selfishness, for all that you would pay bitterly for it in the end.  You will be acting in a way utterly unworthy of a man who has studied and reflected.’

Thyrza heard Egremont laugh.

‘To hear all this from you,’ he said, ‘surprises me very much.’

‘You credit me with so little power of mind?’

’I thought you were the last to talk the common talk of the world that has outlived its generous instincts.’

’Pray believe that there is such a thing as outliving youthful passion, and yet retaining all the generous feeling that you speak of.  I am not an ignoble schemer, and you know that I am not.  Think over my arguments before you scorn me.’