Despair's Last Journey by David Christie Murray

There are just as many different ways of falling in love as there are characters and temperaments, and even the same man -- unless he be a fellow of no originality -- will not fall in love twice in the same fashion. As to the wisdom or righteousness or the mere everyday question of plain honour involved in the permission which Paul Armstrong gave himself to fall in love at all, under the conditions in which he stood, there seemed room for no illusion. He should by this time have been something of a man of the world, and might reasonably be supposed to be acting with his eyes open to consequences. He had his compunctions by the hundred, his hoverings by the way, and turnings back from it. But many delicate signs which would have been invisible to him had he been less interested persuaded him that love lay ready for him, and after all the follies of his slaveries here and there, he persuaded himself that if he could but accept it, it was of a kind to atone for all that had gone before.

And why, he asked himself, if this were true, should he stand for ever in loneliness? It was in him to be constant if only truth were met with truth. He could have been faithful to Claudia. He could have been faithful to Annette. He could have been faithful to Gertrude. And though no man whose sense of the humour of life does not leave him wholly blind to the comedy of his own existence could fail to see the bitter jest that lay here against himself, he urged the point seriously. He _had_ been true in each case until faith had grown into blind folly, and bare respect for an old idol had become impossible. The one crime of his life had been acted against himself. He had believed Annette, and in the mere feebleness of acquiescence he had hung a weight about his neck which he was doomed to carry as long as her life should last.