The love stories we tell, tell
only the net consequence, the ruling effect....
How can I rescue from the past now the mystical quality of Beatrice; my
intense longing for her; the overwhelming, irrational, formless desire?
How can I explain how intimately that worship mingled with a high,
impatient resolve to make her mine, to take her by strength and courage,
to do my loving in a violent heroic manner? And then the doubts, the
puzzled arrest at the fact of her fluctuations, at her refusal to marry
me, at the fact that even when at last she returned to Bedley Corner she
seemed to evade me?
That exasperated me and perplexed me beyond measure.
I felt that it was treachery. I thought of every conceivable
explanation, and the most exalted and romantic confidence in her did not
simply alternate, but mingled with the basest misgivings.
And into the tangle of memories comes the figure of Carnaby, coming
out slowly from the background to a position of significance, as an
influence, as a predominant strand in the nets that kept us apart, as a
rival.
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