interval a similar part was enacted in the class-room, and
an answer came:

I know you mean my good. But I don't want to be respectable!
To produce "Human development in its richest diversity" (to
quote your Humboldt) is to my mind far above respectability.
No doubt my tastes are low--in your view--hopelessly low!
If you won t let me go to him, will you grant me this one
request--allow me to live in your house in a separate way?

To this he returned no answer.

She wrote again:

I know what you think. But cannot you have pity on me? I beg
you to; I implore you to be merciful! I would not ask if I
were not almost compelled by what I can't bear! No poor woman
has ever wished more than I that Eve had not fallen, so that
(as the primitive Christians believed) some harmless mode of
vegetation might have peopled Paradise. But I won't trifle!
Be kind to me--even though I have not been kind to you! I
will go away, go abroad, anywhere, and never trouble you.

Nearly an hour passed, and then he returned an answer:

I do not wish to pain you. How well you KNOW I don't! Give me
a little time. I am disposed to agree to your last request.

One line from her:

Thank you from my heart, Richard. I do not deserve your
kindness.

All day Phillotson bent a dazed regard upon her through the glazed
partition; and he felt as lonely as when he had not known her.

But he was as good as his word, and consented to her living apart
in the house. At first, when they met at meals, she had seemed
more composed under the new arrangement; but the irksomeness of
their position worked on her temperament, and the fibres of her
nature seemed strained like harp-strings. She talked vaguely and
indiscriminately to prevent his talking pertinently.

IV

Phillotson was sitting up late, as was often his custom, trying to
get together the materials for his long-neglected hobby of Roman
antiquities. For the first time since reviving the subject he felt a
return of his old interest in it. He forgot time and place, and when
he remembered himself and ascended to rest it was nearly two o'clock.

His preoccupation was such that, though he now slept on the other
side of the house, he mechanically went to the room that he and his
wife had occupied when he first became a tenant of Old-Grove Place,
which since his differences with Sue had been hers exclusively.
He en