This effort would be to say No--he lived in terror of having to.

He should be proposed to at a given moment--it was only a question of time--and then he should have to do a thing that would be extremely disagreeable.

He almost wished, on occasion, that he wasn't so sure he WOULD do it.

He knew himself, however, well enough not to doubt: he knew coldly, quite bleakly, where he would, at the crisis, draw the line.

It was Maggie's marriage and Maggie's finer happiness--happy as he had supposed her before--that had made the difference; he hadn't in the other time, it now seemed to him, had to think of such things.