tions that
transcend their literal sense, true thoughts and feelings are difficult
to disguise even in written speech. Could it be possible after all that
had happened that Maude still loved me? I continually put the thought
away from me, but continually it returned to haunt me. Suppose Maude
could not help loving me, in spite of my weaknesses and faults, even as
I loved Nancy in spite of hers? Love is no logical thing.

It was Matthew I wanted, Matthew of whom I thought, and trivial,
long-forgotten incidents of the past kept recurring to me constantly. I
still received his weekly letters; but he did not ask why, since I
had taken a vacation, I had not come over to them. He represented
the medium, the link between Maude and me that no estrangement, no
separation could break.

All this new vision of mine was for him, for the coming generation, the
soil in which it must be sown, the Americans of the future. And who so
well as Matthew, sensitive yet brave, would respond to it? I wished not
only to give him what I had begun to grasp, to study with him, to be
his companion and friend, but to spare him, if possible, some of my
own mistakes and sufferings and punishments. But could I go back? Happy
coincidences of desires and convictions had been so characteristic of
that other self I had been struggling to cast off: I had so easily been
persuaded, when I had had a chance of getting Nancy, that it was the
right thing to do! And now, in my loneliness, was I not growing just as
eager to be convinced that it was my duty to go back to the family
which in the hour of self-sufficiency I had cast off? I had believed in
divorce then--why not now? Well, I still believed in it. I had
thought of a union with Nancy as something that would bring about
the "self-realization that springs from the gratification of a great
passion,"--an appealing phrase I had read somewhere. But, it was at
least a favourable symptom that I was willing now to confess that the
"self-realization" had been a secondary and sentimental consideration,
a rosy, self-created halo to give a moral and religious sanction to my
desire. Was I not trying to do that very thing now? It tortured me
to think so; I strove to achieve a detached consideration of the
problem,--to arrive at length at a thought that seemed illuminating:
that the it "wrongness" or "rightness," utility and happiness of all
such unions depend upon whether or not they become a part of the woof
and warp o