“Yes, yes,” he said; “except in your case you told me to get a position. The homely word
“Poor, dear head.” She reached up a hand and passed the fingers soothingly through his hair. “Let it go around no more. Let us begin anew, now. I loved you all the time. I know that I was weak in yielding to my mother’s will. I should not have done so. Yet I have heard you speak so often with broad charity of the fallibility and frailty of humankind. Extend that charity to me. I acted mistakenly. Forgive me.”
“Oh, I do forgive,” he said impatiently. “It is easy to forgive where there is really nothing to forgive. Nothing that you have done requires forgiveness. One acts according to one’s lights, and more than that one cannot do. As well might I ask you to forgive me for my not getting a job.”
“I meant well,” she protested. “You know that I could not have loved you and not meant well.”
“True; but you would have destroyed me out of your well-meaning.”
“Yes, yes,” he shut off her attempted objection. “You would have destroyed my writing and my career. Realism is imperative to my nature, and the bourgeois spirit hates realism. The bourgeoisie is cowardly. It is afraid of life. And all your effort was to make me afraid of life. You would have formalized me. You would have compressed me into a two-by-four pigeonhole of life, where all life’s values are unreal, and false, and vulgar.” He felt her stir protestingly. “Vulgarity—a hearty vulgarity, I’ll admit—is the basis of bourgeois refinement and culture. As I say, you wanted to formalize me, to make me over into one of your own class, with your class-ideals, class-values, and class-prejudices.” He shook his head sadly. “And you do not understand, even now, what I am saying. My words do not mean to you what I endeavor to make them mean. What I say is so much fantasy to you. Yet to me it is vital reality. At the best you are a trifle puzzled and amused that this raw boy, crawling up out of the mire of the abyss, should pass judgment upon your class and call it vulgar.”
She leaned her head wearily against his shoulder, and her body shivered with recurrent nervousness. He waited for a time for her to speak, and then went on.
“And now you want to renew our love. You want us to be married. You want me. And yet, listen—if my books had not been noticed, I’d nevertheless have been just what I am now. And you would have stayed away. It is all those damned books—”
“Don’t swear,” she interrupted.
Her reproof startled him. He broke into a harsh laugh.
“That’s it,” he said, “at a high moment, when what seems your life’s happiness is at stake, you are afraid of life in the same old way—afraid of life and a healthy oath.”
She was stung by his words into realization of the puerility of her act, and yet she felt that he had magnified it unduly and was consequently resentful. They sat in silence for a long time, she thinking desperately and he pondering upon his love which had departed. He knew, now, that he had not really loved her. It was an idealized Ruth he had loved, an ethereal creature of his own creating, the bright and luminous spirit of his love-poems. The real bourgeois Ruth, with all the bourgeois failings and with the hopeless cramp of the bourgeois psychology in her mind, he had never loved.
She suddenly began to speak.
“I know that much you have said is so. I have been afraid of life. I did not love you well enough. I have learned to love better. I love you for what you are, for what you were, for the ways even by which you have become. I love you for the ways wherein you differ from what you call my class, for your beliefs which I do not understand but which I know I can come to understand. I shall devote myself to understanding them. And even your smoking and your swearing—they are part of you and I will love you for them, too. I can still learn. In the last ten minutes I have learned much. That I have dared to come here is a token of what I have already learned. Oh, Martin!—”