He did not change his clothes, but, after lighting the candle, took off
his watch and chain, laid them on the table, and sat down at once to
write. The book of his compromising record was kept in a locked drawer,
which he pulled out violently, and did not even trouble to push back
afterwards.
In this queer pedantism of a man who had read, thought, lived, pen in
hand, there is the sincerity of the attempt to grapple by the same means
with another profounder knowledge. After some passages which have been
already made use of in the building up of this narrative, or add nothing
new to the psychological side of this disclosure (there is even one more
allusion to the silver medal in this last entry), comes a page and
a half of incoherent writing where his expression is baffled by the
novelty and the mysteriousness of that side of our emotional life to
which his solitary existence had been a stranger. Then only he begins
to address directly the reader he had in his mind, trying to express in
broken sentences, full of wonder and awe, the sovereign (he uses that
very word) power of her person over his imagination, in which lay the
dormant seed of her brother's words.
"... The most trustful eyes in the world--your brother said of you
when he was as well as a dead man already.
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