Prev | Current Page 946 | Next

Hichens, Robert Smythe, 1864-1950

"A Spirit in Prison"


"I needed a little blindness in my friend. That is true. But the
blindness that I needed was not blindness to my little sacrifices, but
blindness to my little faults.
"To a woman there is such a world of difference between the two! I
longed for my friend to see the smoke ascending from my small burnt-
offerings of self made for his sake. But I longed, too, for him not
always to see with calm, clear eyes my petty failings, my minute
vanities, my inconsistencies, my incongruities, my frequent lack of
reasoning power and logical sequence, my gusts of occasional injustice
--ending nearly always in a rain of undue benefits--my surely
forgivable follies of sentiment, my irritabilities--how often due to
physical causes which no man could ever understand!--my blunders of
the head--of the heart I made but few, or none--my weak depressions,
struggled against but not always conquered, my perhaps childish
anxieties and apprehensions, my forebodings, not invariably well
founded, my fleeting absurdities of temper, of temperament, of manner,
or of word.


Pages:
934 935 936 937 938 939 940 941 942 943 944 945 946 947 948 949 950 951 952 953 954 955 956 957 958