I had accepted the position as part of my calling in
life; I had trained myself to leave all the sympathies natural to
my age in my employer's outer hall, as coolly as I left my
umbrella there before I went upstairs. I had long since learnt to
understand, composedly and as a matter of course, that my
situation in life was considered a guarantee against any of my
female pupils feeling more than the most ordinary interest in me,
and that I was admitted among beautiful and captivating women much
as a harmless domestic animal is admitted among them. This
guardian experience I had gained early; this guardian experience
had sternly and strictly guided me straight along my own poor
narrow path, without once letting me stray aside, to the right
hand or to the left. And now I and my trusty talisman were parted
for the first time. Yes, my hardly-earned self-control was as
completely lost to me as if I had never possessed it; lost to me,
as it is lost every day to other men, in other critical
situations, where women are concerned. I know, now, that I should
have questioned myself from the first. I should have asked why
any room in the house was better than home to me when she entered
it, and barren as a desert when she went out again--why I always
noticed and remembered the little changes in her dress that I had
noticed and remembered in no other woman's before--why I saw her,
heard her, and touched her (when we shook hands at night and
morning) as I had never seen, heard, and touched any other woman
in my life? I should have looked into my own heart, and found this
new growth springing up there, and plucked it out while it was
young.
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