ey were deeply
concerned together, although I am aware that my readers are speculating
on this point already. The judge left that to Adelle and Tom Clark and
Providence, and we can safely do the same thing. He set them forth on
their jaunt after the stray members of the Clark tribe and other deeds
with a favorable expectation that they would commit along the road only
the necessary minimum of folly, and above all, sure of Adelle's
destination. For at twenty-six she had passed through crude desire,
through passion and pain and sorrow, and had discovered for herself the
last commonplace of human thinking--that the end of life is not the
"pursuit of happiness," as our materialistic forefathers put it in the
Constitution they made for us, and cannot be "guaranteed" to any mortal.
With that bedrock axiom of human wisdom embedded in her steadfast
nature, to what heights might not the dumb Adelle, the pale, passive,
inarticulate woman creature, ultimately rise?

There were many stations on her road. And first of all her husband,
Archie. Adelle began to think again about Archie in the new light she
had. She had not thought about him at all since she had dropped him so
summarily from her life after the fire at Highcourt. She wrote him
finally a considerable letter, in which she made plain the results of
her thinking. It was a surprising letter, as Archie felt, not only in
length, but in its point of view and its kindly tone. She seemed to see
the great wrong she had ignorantly done to him. The youth she had
blindly taken to gratify her green passion and to become the father of
her only child! She had ruined him, as far as any one human being can
ruin another, and now she knew it. She had been the stupid means of
providing him with a feast of folly, and then had abandoned him when he
behaved badly. So she wrote him gently, as one who at last comprehended
that mercy and forgiveness are due all those whom we harm upon our road
either consciously or ignorantly, giving them evil to eat. Yet she saw
the crude folly of attempting to resume their marriage in any way, and
did not for once consider it. They had sinned gravely against each other
and must face life anew, separately, recognizing that theirs was an
irreparable mistake. So she wrote unpassionately of the legal divorce
which must come. And she gave him money, promising him more as he might
need it, within reason. Archie straightway put a good part of it into
oil wells because e