And yet I am so little of a man that I let her come near death and never try to save her." "But, confound it, man, it may have been mere absence of mind.

You were always an extraordinarily plucky chap." Wratislaw spoke irritably, for it seemed to him sheer folly.
Lewis looked at him imploringly.

"Can you not understand ?" he cried.
Wratislaw did understand, and suddenly.

The problem was subtler than he had thought.

Weakness was at the core of it, weakness revealed in self-deception and self-accusation alike, the weakness of the finical dreamer, the man with the unrobust conscience.