en the contracting parties to
keep faith with themselves, and not to live together for a moment after
complete accord had ceased to exist between them. The new adultery was
unfaithfulness to self.

It was, as Westall had just reminded her, on this understanding that
they had married. The ceremony was an unimportant concession to social
prejudice: now that the door of divorce stood open, no marriage need be
an imprisonment, and the contract therefore no longer involved any
diminution of self-respect. The nature of their attachment placed them
so far beyond the reach of such contingencies that it was easy to
discuss them with an open mind; and Julia's sense of security made her
dwell with a tender insistence on Westall's promise to claim his
release when he should cease to love her. The exchange of these vows
seemed to make them, in a sense, champions of the new law, pioneers in
the forbidden realm of individual freedom: they felt that they had
somehow achieved beatitude without martyrdom.

This, as Julia now reviewed the past, she perceived to have been her
theoretical attitude toward marriage. It was unconsciously,
insidiously, that her ten years of happiness with Westall had developed
another conception of the tie; a reversion, rather, to the old instinct
of passionate dependency and possessorship that now made her blood
revolt at the mere hint of change. Change? Renewal? Was that what they
had called it, in their foolish jargon? Destruction, extermination
rather--this rending of a myriad fibres interwoven with another's
being! Another? But he was not other! He and she were one, one in the
mystic sense which alone gave marriage its significance. The new law
was not for them, but for the disunited creatures forced into a mockery
of union. The gospel she had felt called on to proclaim had no bearing
on her own case.... She sent for the doctor and told him she was sure
she needed a nerve tonic.

She took the nerve tonic diligently, but it failed to act as a sedative
to her fears. She did not know what she feared; but that made her
anxiety the more pervasive. Her husband had not reverted to the subject
of his Saturday talks. He was unusually kind and considerate, with a
softening of his quick manner, a touch of shyness in his consideration,
that sickened her with new fears. She told herself that it was because
she looked badly--because he knew about the doctor and the nerve
tonic--that he showed this deference to her wi