“I must try to give expression to what is in my mind; it shall and must be spoken. Though you see me so confounded—though you strike me so helpless—I ask you to believe that there are many people who think well of me; that there are some people who highly esteem me; that I have in my way won a station which is considered worth winning.”
“Surely, Mr. Headstone, I do believe it. Surely I have always known it from Charley.”
“I ask you to believe that if I were to offer my home such as it is, my station such as it is, my affections such as they are, to any one of the best considered, and best qualified, and most distinguished, among the young women engaged in my calling, they would probably be accepted. Even readily accepted.”
“I do not doubt it,” said Lizzie, with her eyes upon the ground.
“I have sometimes had it in my thoughts to make that offer and to settle down as many men of my class do: I on the one side of a school, my wife on the other, both of us interested in the same work.”
“Why have you not done so?” asked Lizzie Hexam. “Why do you not do so?”
“Far better that I never did! The only one grain of comfort I have had these many weeks,” he said, always speaking passionately, and, when most emphatic, repeating that former action of his hands, which was like flinging his heart’s blood down before her in drops upon the pavement-stones; “the only one grain of comfort I have had these many weeks is, that I never did. For if I had, and if the same spell had come upon me for my ruin, I know I should have broken that tie asunder as if it had been thread.”
She glanced at him with a glance of fear, and a shrinking gesture. He answered, as if she had spoken.