I--I didn't think of what I was
saying."
"Well, then--you will guess that it isn't exactly easy. But I will
wait as you ask me. When you are quite sure--you will let me go?"
"Yes," he said.
Neither of them looked at the other.
Does Jove indeed laugh at lover's perjuries? Even more at their
stupidities, perhaps!
CHAPTER XXXII
For they really were stupid! Looking on, we can see so plainly what
they should have seen, and didn't.
If thoughts are things (and Professor Spence continues to argue that
they are) a mistaken thought is quite as powerful a reality as the
other kind. Only let it be conceived with sufficient force and
nourished by continual attention and it will grow into a veritable
high-wayman of the mind--a thievish tyrant of one's mental roads,
holding their more legitimate travellers at the stand and deliver.
Desire, usually so clearsighted, ought to have seen that the
attentions of Benis to the too-sympathetic Mary were hollow at the
core. But this, her mistaken Thought would by no means allow.
Ceaselessly on the watch, it leapt upon every unprejudiced deduction
and turned it to the strengthening of its own mistaken self. What
might have seemed merely boredom on the professor's part was twisted
by the Thought to appear an anguished effort after self-control. Any
avoidance of Mary's society was attributed to fear rather than to
indifference. And so on and so on.
Spence, too, a man learned in the byways of the mind, ought to have
known that, to Desire, John was a refuge merely, and Mary the real
lion in the way.
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