" Idiots begged for my autograph--publishers urged me to write my
reminiscences of him--critics consulted me about the reading of doubtful
lines. And I knew that, to all these people, I was the woman Vincent
Rendle had loved.
After a while that fire went out too and I was left alone with my past.
Alone--quite alone; for he had never really been with me. The intellectual
union counted for nothing now. It had been soul to soul, but never hand in
hand, and there were no little things to remember him by.
Then there set in a kind of Arctic winter. I crawled into myself as into a
snow-hut. I hated my solitude and yet dreaded any one who disturbed it.
That phase, of course, passed like the others. I took up life again, and
began to read the papers and consider the cut of my gowns. But there was
one question that I could not be rid of, that haunted me night and day.
Why had he never loved me? Why had I been so much to him, and no more? Was
I so ugly, so essentially unlovable, that though a man might cherish me as
his mind's comrade, he could not care for me as a woman? I can't tell you
how that question tortured me. It became an obsession.
My poor friend, do you begin to see? I had to find out what some other man
thought of me. Don't be too hard on me! Listen first--consider. When I
first met Vincent Rendle I was a young woman, who had married early and
led the quietest kind of life; I had had no "experiences." From the hour
of our first meeting to the day of his death I never looked at any other
man, and never noticed whether any other man looked at me.
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