The World of Chance by William Dean Howells

They had certainly come to an understanding, and for Ray at least there / was release from the obscure sense of culpability which had so long / harassed him. He knew that unless he was sure of his love for Peace, he / was to blame for letting her trust it; but now that he had spoken, and / spoken frankly, it had freed them both to go on and be friends without / fear for each other. Her confession that there had been a time when she / loved him flattered his vanity out of the pain of knowing that she did / not love him now; it consoled him, it justified him; for the offence / which he had accused himself of was of no other kind than hers. How / wisely, how generously she had taken the whole matter!

The question whether she had not taken it more generously than he / merited began to ask itself. She might have chosen to feign a parity / with him in this. He had read of women who sacrificed their love to / their love; and consented to a life-long silence, or practised a / life-long deceit, that the men they loved might never know they loved / them. He had never personally known of such a case, but the books were / full of such cases. This might be one of them. Or it might much more / simply and probably be that she had received his strange declaration as / she did in order to spare his feelings. If that were true she had / already told her sister, and Mrs. Denton had turned the absurd side of / it to the light, and had made Peace laugh it over with her.

A cold perspiration broke out over him at the notion, which he rejected / upon a moment's reflection as unworthy of Peace. He got back to his / compassionate admiration of her, as he walked down to the ferry and / began his homeward journey. He looked about the boat, and fancied it the / same he had crossed to New York in, when he came to the city nearly a / year before. The old negro who whistled, limped silently through the / long saloon; he glanced from right to left on the passengers, but he / must have thought them too few, or not in the mood for his music. Ray / wondered if he whistled only for the incoming passengers. He recalled / every circumstance of his acquaintance with Peace, from the moment she / caught his notice when Mrs. Denton made her outcry about the / pocket-book. He saw how once it had seemed to deepen to love, and then / had ceased to do so, but he did not see how. There had been everything / in it to make them more to each other, but after a certain time they had / grown less. It was not so strange to him that he had changed; he had / often changed; but we suppose a constancy in others as to all passions / which we cannot exact of ourselves. He tried to think what he had done / to alienate the love which she confessed she once had for him, and he / could not remember anything unless it was his cruelty to her when he / found that she was the friend who would not look at his story a second / time. She said she had forgiven him that; but perhaps she had not; / perhaps she had divined a potential brutality in him, which made her / afraid to trust him.

But after that their lives had been united in the / most intimate anxieties, and she had shown absolute trust in him. He / reviewed his conduct toward her throughout, and he could find no blame / in it except for that one thing. He could truly feel that he had been / her faithful friend, and the friend of her whole uncomfortable family, / in spite of all his prejudices and principles against people of that / kind. In the recognition of this fact he enjoyed a moment's sense of / injury, which was heightened when he reflected that he had even been / willing to sacrifice his pride, after his brilliant literary success, so / far as to offer himself to a girl who worked for her living; it had / always galled him that she held a place little better than a / type-writer's. No, he had nothing to accuse himself of, after a scrutiny / of his behavior repeated in every detail, and applied in complex, again / and again, with helpless iteration. Still he had a remote feeling of / self-reproach, which he tried to verify, but which forever eluded him. / It was mixed up with that sense of escape, which made him ashamed.

He lay awake in the sleeping-car the greater part of the night, and / turned from side to side, seeking for the reason of a thing that can / never have any reason, and trying to find some parity between his / expectations and experiences of himself in such an affair. It went / through his mind that it would be a good thing to write a story with / some such situation in it; only the reader would not stand it. People / expected love to begin mysteriously, but they did not like it to end so; / though life itself began mysteriously and ended so. He believed that he / should really try it; a story that opened with an engagement ought to be / as interesting as one that closed with an engagement; and it would be / very original. He must study his own affair very closely when he got a / little further away from it. There was no doubt but that when the / chances that favored love were so many and so recognizable, the chance / that undid it could at last be recognized. It was merely a chance, and / that ought to be shown.