held up to admiration the fidelity which is so remarkable in
Shakespeare, and lamented that in these days it was so rare to find
anything of the kind, he thought that we were becoming more
indifferent to one another. He maintained, however, that man should
be everything to man, and he then enlarged on the duty of really
cultivating affection, of its superiority to books, and on the
pleasure and profit of self-denial. I do not mean to accuse Clem of
downright hypocrisy. I have known many persons come up from the
country and go into raptures over a playhouse sun and moon who have
never bestowed a glance or a thought on the real sun and moon to be
seen from their own doors; and we are all aware it by no means
follows because we are moved to our very depths by the spectacle of
unrecognised, uncomplaining endurance in a novel, that therefore we
can step over the road to waste an hour or a sixpence upon the
unrecognised, uncomplaining endurance of the poor lone woman left a
widow in the little villa there. I was annoyed with myself because
Clem's abandonment of me so much affected me. I wished I could cut
the rope and carelessly cast him adrift as he had cast me adrift, but
I could not. I never could make out and cannot make out what was the
secret of his influence over me; why I was unable to say, "If you do
not care for me I do not care for you." I longed sometimes for
complete rupture, so that we might know exactly where we were, but it
never came. Gradually our intercourse grew thinner and thinner,
until at last I heard that he had been spending a fortnight with some
semi-aristocratic acquaintance within five miles of me, and during
the whole of that time he never came near me. I met him in a railway
station soon afterwards, when he came up to me effusive and
apparently affectionate. "It was a real grief to me, my dear
fellow," he said, "that I could not call on you last month, but the
truth was I was so driven: they would make me go here and go there,