t she needed for her moral well-being,
and never would forego, a large amount of physical exercise. At
Blithedale, no inclemency of sky or muddiness of earth had ever impeded
her daily walks. Here in town, she probably preferred to tread the
extent of the two drawing-rooms, and measure out the miles by spaces of
forty feet, rather than bedraggle her skirts over the sloppy pavements.
Accordingly, in about the time requisite to pass through the arch of
the sliding-doors to the front window, and to return upon her steps,
there she stood again, between the festoons of the crimson curtains.
But another personage was now added to the scene. Behind Zenobia
appeared that face which I had first encountered in the wood-path; the
man who had passed, side by side with her, in such mysterious
familiarity and estrangement, beneath my vine curtained hermitage in
the tall pine-tree. It was Westervelt. And though he was looking
closely over her shoulder, it still seemed to me, as on the former
occasion, that Zenobia repelled him,--that, perchance, they mutually
repelled each other, by some incompatibility of their spheres.

This impression, however, might have been altogether the result of
fancy and prejudice in me. The distance was so great as to obliterate
any play of feature by which I might otherwise have been made a
partaker of their counsels.

There now needed only Hollingsworth and old Moodie to complete the knot
of characters, whom a real intricacy of events, greatly assisted by my
method of insulating them from other relations, had kept so long upon
my mental stage, as actors in a drama. In itself, perhaps, it was no
very remarkable event that they should thus come across me, at the
moment when I imagined myself free. Zenobia, as I well knew, had
retained an establishment in town, and had not unfrequently withdrawn
herself from Blithedale during brief intervals, on one of which
occasions she had taken Priscilla along with her. Nevertheless, there
seemed something fatal in the coincidence that had borne me to this one
spot, of all others in a great city, and transfixed me there, and
compelled me again to waste my already wearied sympathies on affairs
which were none of mine, and persons who cared little for me. It
irritated my nerves; it affected me with a kind of heart-sickness.
After the effort which it cost me to fling them off,--after
consummating my escape, as I thought, from these goblins of flesh and
blood, an