on. The unfolding of their inner life
followed intricate spirals, returned on itself, coiled outward again.
Sometimes Sophy found herself standing breathless in a glow of the old
glamour, that fell on her as if through a far window in the past,
reflected back from the blank wall of the present. Then she would think
that perhaps the man that he had seemed in their first love-days was the
real man, and this Morris only the result of their hectic, vapid life.
Again, she would wonder if he had really ever been what she had dreamed
him, even then. It was as if some rare spirit had "possessed" him for
the time being. Or was it that love had transfigured him? She could not
bridge with her reason the gulf that lay between his past and his
present personality.

Then as the months passed, and he grew more and more relaxed and
slovenly of spirit under the ease of possession, she came to think that
he had never been Endymion at all. She had loved a wraith, a seeming.
She did not realise that sometimes love works temporary miracles, even
as religion does; that love also makes conversions which are very real
for the moment, but that cannot stand the wear of every day.

But when the final realisation came, Sophy felt as if life were over for
her. Love had seemed the only real life; now love was over. She sat
alone in her bedroom one night, thinking: "Love is over ... love is
over...." She felt such anguish at this thought as drove her to her
feet. She went and stood at her window, looking out at the bare trees in
the Square and the cross of electric lights against the sky, made dark
purple by contrast with the orange glow. She felt as if it were too much
to bear--this second terrible mistake. And yet, what escape was there?
It seemed to her that there was no escape. Her misery was all the more
terrible because life had given her a second chance, as it were--and
for a second time she had built her House of Love upon the sands. Vain
regret stole over her like lava. It spread barrenness. Once more her
creative gift lay strangled under the ashes of her own mistake.

She thought: "This is age--this devastated feeling. I am really old now.
I am only thirty-two, but I could not feel older in spirit if I were
eighty."

Her affection for him only made this death of deeper love more terrible.
As in a pale shadow-play, she saw her shadow-self, repeating the role
that she had once enacted in a more vivid drama--the role of wife to a
man whom