His feelings
about Terence and Rachel were so complicated that he had never yet been
able to bring himself to say that he was glad that they were going to
be married. He saw their faults so clearly, and the inferior nature of
a great deal of their feeling for each other, and he expected that their
love would not last. He looked at them again, and, very strangely, for
he was so used to thinking that he seldom saw anything, the look of them
filled him with a simple emotion of affection in which there were some
traces of pity also. What, after all, did people's faults matter in
comparison with what was good in them? He resolved that he would now
tell them what he felt. He quickened his pace and came up with them just
as they reached the corner where the lane joined the main road. They
stood still and began to laugh at him, and to ask him whether the
gastric juices--but he stopped them and began to speak very quickly and
stiffly.
"D'you remember the morning after the dance?" he demanded. "It was here
we sat, and you talked nonsense, and Rachel made little heaps of stones.
I, on the other hand, had the whole meaning of life revealed to me in
a flash." He paused for a second, and drew his lips together in a tight
little purse. "Love," he said. "It seems to me to explain everything.
So, on the whole, I'm very glad that you two are going to be married.
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