n. On Monday night he had written a long letter to his wife, but
when morning came he was afraid to send it, and the letter was still in
his pocket. Winifred was not a woman who could bear disappointment. She
demanded a great deal of herself and of the people she loved; and
she never failed herself. If he told her now, he knew, it would be
irretrievable. There would be no going back. He would lose the thing
he valued most in the world; he would be destroying himself and his own
happiness. There would be nothing for him afterward. He seemed to see
himself dragging out a restless existence on the Continent--Cannes,
Hyeres, Algiers, Cairo--among smartly dressed, disabled men of every
nationality; forever going on journeys that led nowhere; hurrying to
catch trains that he might just as well miss; getting up in the morning
with a great bustle and splashing of water, to begin a day that had no
purpose and no meaning; dining late to shorten the night, sleeping late
to shorten the day.

And for what? For a mere folly, a masquerade, a little thing that he
could not let go. AND HE COULD EVEN LET IT GO, he told himself. But he
had promised to be in London at mid-summer, and he knew that he would
go. . . . It was impossible to live like this any longer.

And this, then, was to be the disaster that his old professor had
foreseen for him: the crack in the wall, the crash, the cloud of dust.
And he could not understand how it had come about. He felt that he
himself was unchanged, that he was still there, the same man he had been
five years ago, and that he was sitting stupidly by and letting some
resolute offshoot of himself spoil his life for him. This new force was
not he, it was but a part of him. He would not even admit that it was
stronger than he; but it was more active. It was by its energy that this
new feeling got the better of him. His wife was the woman who had made
his life, gratified his pride, given direction to his tastes and habits.
The life they led together seemed to him beautiful. Winifred still was,
as she had always been, Romance for him, and whenever he was deeply
stirred he turned to her. When the grandeur and beauty of the world
challenged him--as it challenges even the most self-absorbed people--he
always answered with her name. That was his reply to the question put
by the mountains and the stars; to all the spiritual aspects of life.
In his feeling for his wife there was all the tenderness, all the pride,