when i recall these long past emotions again, i am struck by the profound essential difference between my feelings for your mother and for mary. they were so different that it seems scarcely rational to me that they should be called by the same name. yet each was love, profoundly deep and sincere. the contrast lies, i think, in our relative ages, and our relative maturity; that altered the quality of all our emotions. the one was the love of a man of six-and-twenty, exceptionally seasoned and experienced and responsible for his years, for a girl still at school, a girl attractively beautiful, mysterious and unknown to him; the other was the love of coevals, who had been playmates and intimate companions, and of whom the woman was certainly as capable and wilful as the man.
now it is exceptional for men to love women of their own age, it is the commoner thing that they should love maidens younger and often much younger than themselves. this is true more particularly of our own class; the masculine thirties and forties marry the feminine twenties, all the prevailing sentiment and usage between the sexes rises naturally out of that. we treat this seniority as though it were a virile characteristic; we treat the man as though he were a natural senior, we expect a weakness, a timid deference, in the girl. i and mary had loved one another as two rivers run together on the way to the sea, we had grown up side by side to the moment when we kissed; but i sought your mother, i watched her and desired her and chose her, very tenderly and worshipfully indeed, to be mine. i do not remember that there was any corresponding intention in my mind to be hers. i do not think that that idea came in at all. she was something to be won, something playing an inferior and retreating part. and i was artificial in all my attitudes to her, i thought of what would interest her, what would please her, i knew from the outset that what she saw in me to rouse that deep, shy glow of exaltation in her face was illusion, illusion it was my business to sustain. and so i won her, and long years had to pass, years of secret loneliness and hidden feelings, of preposterous pretences and covert perplexities, before we escaped from that crippling tradition of inequality and looked into one another's eyes with understanding and forgiveness, a woman and a man.
i made no great secret of the interest and attraction i found in rachel, and the mores made none of their entire approval of me. i walked over on the second occasion, and ridinghanger opened out, a great flower of genial appreciation that i came alone, hiding nothing of its dawning perception that it was rachel in particular i came to see.
your grandmother's match-making was as honest as the day. there was the same salad of family and visitors as on the former afternoon, and this time i met freshman, who was destined to marry alice; there was tea, tennis, and, by your grandmother's suggestion, a walk to see the sunset from the crest of the hill. rachel and i walked across the breezy moorland together, while i talked and tempted her to talk.
what, i wonder, did we talk about? english scenery, i think, and african scenery and the weald about us, and the long history of the weald and its present and future, and at last even a little of politics. i had never explored the mind of a girl of seventeen before; there was a surprise in all she knew and a delight in all she didn't know, and about herself a candor, a fresh simplicity of outlook that was sweeter than the clear air about us, sweeter than sunshine or the rising song of a lark. she believed so gallantly and beautifully, she was so perfectly, unaffectedly and certainly prepared to be a brave and noble person—if only life would let her. and she hadn't as yet any suspicion that life might make that difficult....
i went to ridinghanger a number of times in the spring and early summer. i talked a great deal with rachel, and still i did not make love to her. it was always in my mind that i would make love to her, the heavens and earth and all her family were propitious, glowing golden with consent and approval, i thought she was the most wonderful and beautiful thing in life, and her eyes, the intonation of her voice, her hurrying color and a hundred little involuntary signs told me how she quickened at my coming. but there was a shyness. i loved her as one loves and admires a white flower or a beautiful child—some stranger's child. i felt that i might make her afraid of me. i had never before thought that to make love is a coarse thing. but still at high summer when i met mary again no definite thing had been said between myself and rachel. but we knew, each of us knew, that somewhere in a world less palpable, in fairyland, in dreamland, we had met and made our vows.
