When I was just getting into comfortable...

When I was just getting into comfortable practice I was thrown very much into the company of the wife of one of my clients. We grew to love each other deeply, passionately, almost before we were aware of it. We owned our love, recognized its hopelessness, and resolved to part. We parted, and endured some months of banishment worse than death ; then we met again, and after a few mad weeks we determined to make our own happiness in our own world. She arranged to leave her home and to meet me at Liverpool by a certain train. I had our passages taken, and I remember waiting for her, waiting, waiting, waiting. She never came. I went back to town and found a letter from her. Her boy, her only child, was dangerously ill and she had stayed to nurse him. She was a deeply religious woman, though she loved me, and she had vowed to God that if her child's life was spared she would never see me again. I was heart-broken, but I sent her a message that she had done right. The boy's life was spared. I never saw her again. In a few months she was dead. I had a big bout or two of dissipation, then I pulled myself together and worked hammer and tongs, day and night, at my profession. I became successful, and met other women ; had my affairs with them—I won't call them love-affairs—some of them graceful, some of them romantic, none of them quite de- grading, but all of them empty and heartless. And so I frittered away what affections I had left in cheap and facile amours ; and all the while her tender ghost was standing beside me, whispering, "This isn't love ! This isn't love ! You'll never love again as you loved me !" I've been successful and happy after a fashion ; but there has never been a moment* since I lost her when I wouldn't have cheerfully bartered every farthing, every honour, every triumph I've scored in my profession, to stand again on that platform at Liverpool and know that she was coming to.

Henry Arthur Jones. Mrs Dane’s Defence. The Macmillan Company, 1905. pp.25-26