er's gaze. Sitting later in accustomed formality the dulness of a
species of relief folded him. The minor sounds of his home, the
deliberate loudness of an old clock, the minute warring of his mother's
bone needles, her sister's fits of coughing, painfully restrained,
soothed his harried being; subjected to an intolerable strain his
overwrought nerves had suddenly relaxed; he sank back in a loose, almost
somnolent, state. A mental indolence possessed him; the keen incentives
of life appeared far, unimportant, his late rebellions and desires
inexplicable. Even the iron was a heavy load; the necessity of
constantly meeting new conditions with new processes, of uprooting month
by month most with which the years had made him familiar, seemed beyond
his power.

A faint dread crept into his consciousness; he roused himself sharply,
straightened his shoulders, glanced about to see if his tacit surrender
had been noticed--this lassitude creeping over him, the indifference,
was, at last, the edge of the authentic shadow of age, of decay; it was
the deadening of the sensibilities preceding death. He banished it
immediately, and all his desire, his need, his sense of the horror of
the past day, surged back, reanimated him, sent the blood strongly to
its furthest confines. But, none the less, a vague, disturbing memory of
the other lingered at the back of his perceptions; he had a fresh
realization of the necessity for him to make haste, to take at
once--before the hateful anodyne of time had betrayed his vigour--what
life still, and so fully, held.

His desire for Susan increased to an intensity robbing it of a greater
part of the early joy; it had, now, a fretful aspect drawing him into
long and painfully minute rehearsals of his every contact with her, and
of the disgraceful publicity brought upon her by his past. At the usual
hour the hot wine appeared; the glassful was pressed on Amity Merken;
his mother drank hers with the familiar, audible satisfaction. An old
custom, an old compound, brought from Germany many years ago, binding,
in its petty immortality, distant times, places, beings. He saw that his
mother was noticeably less able than she had been the week before; her
hands fumbled at her knitting, shook holding the glass. Her lined face
quivered as she said good night. He bent and kissed a hot, dry brow,
conscious of the blanched skull under her fading colour, her ebbing
warmth. He had done this, too--hastened her death