Mr. Forster not only rejects the story of Stella's marriage with Swift
as lacking substantial evidence, but thinks that the limits of their
intercourse were early fixed and never overpassed. According to him,
their relation was to be, from the first, one "of affection, not
desire." We, on the other hand, believe that she was the only woman
Swift ever loved constantly, that he wished and meant to marry her, that
he probably did marry her,[1] but only when all hope of the old
open-hearted confidence was gone forever, chiefly through his own fault,
if partly through her jealous misconception of his relation to Vanessa,
and that it was the sense of his own weakness, which admitted of no
explanation tolerable to an injured woman, and entailed upon a brief
folly all the consequences of guilt, that more than all else darkened
his lonely decline with unavailing regrets and embittered it with
remorseful self-contempt. Nothing could be more galling to a proud man
than the feeling that he had been betrayed by his vanity. It is commonly
assumed that pride is incompatible with its weaker congener. But pride,
after all, is nothing more than a stiffened and congealed vanity, and
melts back to its original ductility when exposed to the milder
temperature of female partiality. Swift could not deny himself the
flattery of Vanessa's passion, and not to forbid was to encourage.
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