t herself look at it now, admitting
that she had been clutching at a vanished thing.

It would have been different, she felt, had the usual channels of living
been opened to them. Then together they could have reached out into new
experiences. Their love had been real--great. Related to living, surely
it could have remained the heart of life. Her seeing now that much of
the life had gone out of it did not bear down upon her with the great
sadness she would have expected. She knew now that in her heart she had
known for a long time that passion had gone. Facing it was easier than
refusing to see. It ceased to be a terrible thing once one looked at it.
Of this she was sure: love should be able to be a part of the rest of
life; the big relationship, but one among others; the most intense
interest, but one with other interests. Unrooted, detached, it might for
the time be the more intense, but it had less ways of saving itself. If
simply, naturally, they could have grown into the common life she felt
they might have gone on without too much consciousness of change,
growing into new things as old ones died away, half unconsciously making
adjustments, doubtless feeling something gone but in the sharing of new
things not left desolate through that sense of the passing of old ones.
Frightened by the thought of having nothing else, they had tried too
hard. She was tired; she believed that Stuart too was tired.

There was a certain tired tenderness in her thinking of him. Dear
Stuart, he loved easy pleasant living. It seemed he was not meant for
the too great tests, for tragically isolated love. She knew that he had
never ceased to miss the things he had let go--his place among men, the
stimulus of the light, pleasant social relationships with women. He was
meant for a love more flexibly related to living, a love big and real
but fitted more loosely, a little more carelessly, to life. There was
always so deep a contrition for his irritations with her. The whole
trouble was indicated right there, that the contrition should be all out
of proportion to the offence. It would have been better had he felt more
free to be irritated; one should not have to feel frightened at a little
bit of one's own bad temper--appalled at crossness, at hours of ennui.
Driving them back together after every drifting apart all of that made
for an intensity of passion--passion whipped to life by fear. But that
was not the way to grow into life. Flames kin