I shut my mind against my doubts.

'I have changed tonight,' I said.

And I bent down and kissed her.

I was conscious of being defiant against somebody. And then I knew
that the somebody was myself.

I poured myself out a cup of hot coffee from the flask which
Smith, my man, had filled against my return. It put life into me.
The oppression lifted.

And yet there remained something that made for uneasiness, a sort
of foreboding at the back of my mind.

I had taken a step in the dark, and I was afraid for Cynthia. I
had undertaken to give her happiness. Was I certain that I could
succeed? The glow of chivalry had left me, and I began to doubt.

Audrey had taken from me something that I could not recover--poetry
was as near as I could get to a definition of it. Yes, poetry.
With Cynthia my feet would always be on the solid earth. To the
end of the chapter we should be friends and nothing more.

I found myself pitying Cynthia intensely. I saw her future a
series of years of intolerable dullness. She was too good to be
tied for life to a battered hulk like myself.