One cannot predict what will happen.
Life is so full of incidents; a woman's jealous tongue or the arrival
of some acquaintance might bring about a catastrophe. A love affair
hangs upon a gossamer thread, you know, and that is why I tried to
persuade Doris away from her friends.
She was very kind and good and didn't inflict the society of these
people too much upon me. Perhaps she was conscious of the danger
herself, and we only visited the boarding-houses in the evening. But
these visits grew intolerable. The society of Miss Tubbs and Miss
Whitworth jarred the impressions of a long day spent in the open air,
in a landscape where once the temples of the gods had been, where men
had once lived who had seen, or at all events believed, in the fauns
and the dryads, in the grotto where the siren swims.
One afternoon I said to Doris: "I'm afraid I can't go to see Miss
Tubbs this evening. Can't we devise something else? Another dinner in
a boarding-house would lead me to suicide, I think."
"You would like to drown yourself in that bay and join the nymphs. Do
you think they would prove kinder than I?"
I did not answer Doris. I suddenly seemed to despair; the exquisite
tenderness of the sky, and the inveigling curves of the bay seemed to
become detestable to me, theatrical, absurd.
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