s my
custom to arrive at the farm every evening about five o'clock. But as I
look back upon those days they seem to have lost succession, to be fused
together, as it were, into one indeterminable period by the intense
pressure of emotion; unsatisfied emotion,--and the state of physical and
mental disorganization set up by it is in the retrospect not a little
terrifying. The world grew more and more distorted, its affairs were
neglected, things upon which I had set high values became as nothing.
And even if I could summon back something of the sequence of our
intercourse, it would be a mere repetition--growing on my part more
irrational and insistent--of what I have already related. There were
long, troubled, and futile silences when we sat together on the porch
or in the woods and fields; when I wondered whether it were weakness
or strength that caused Nancy to hold out against my importunities:
the fears she professed of retribution, the benumbing effects of the
conventional years, or the deep-rooted remnants of a Calvinism which--as
she proclaimed--had lost definite expression to persist as an intuition.
I recall something she said when she turned to me after one of these
silences.

"Do you know how I feel sometimes? as though you and I had wandered
together into a strange country, and lost our way. We have lost our way,
Hugh--it's all so clandestine, so feverish, so unnatural, so unrelated
to life, this existence we're leading. I believe it would be better if
it were a mere case of physical passion. I can't help it," she went on,
when I had exclaimed against this, "we are too--too complicated, you are
too complicated. It's because we want the morning stars, don't you see?"
She wound her fingers tightly around mine. "We not only want this, but
all of life besides--you wouldn't be satisfied with anything less. Oh,
I know it. That's your temperament, you were made that way, and I
shouldn't be satisfied if you weren't. The time would come when you
would blame me I don't mean vulgarly--and I couldn't stand that. If you
weren't that way, if that weren't your nature, I mean, I should have
given way long ago."

I made some sort of desperate protest.

"No, if I didn't know you so well I believe I should have given in long
ago. I'm not thinking of you alone, but of myself, too. I'm afraid I
shouldn't be happy, that I should begin to think--and then I couldn't
stop. The plain truth, as I've told you over and over again, is t