ed down again
on the sofa....

What was there to keep him from accepting? His wife's affection was
dead--if her sentimental fancy for him had ever deserved the name! And
his passing mastery over her was gone too--he smiled to remember that,
hardly two hours earlier, he had been fatuous enough to think he could
still regain it! Now he said to himself that she would sooner desert a
friend to please him than sacrifice a fraction of her income; and the
discovery cast a stain of sordidness on their whole relation. He could
still imagine struggling to win her back from another man, or even to
save her from some folly into which mistaken judgment or perverted
enthusiasm might have hurried her; but to go on battling against the
dull unimaginative subservience to personal luxury--the slavery to
houses and servants and clothes--ah, no, while he had any fight left in
him it was worth spending in a better cause than that!

Through the open window he could hear, in the mild December stillness,
his horse's feet coming and going on the gravel. _Her_ horse, led up and
down by _her_ servant, at the door of _her_ house!... The sound
symbolized his whole future...the situation his marriage had made for
him, and to which he must henceforth bend, unless he broke with it then
and there.... He tried to look ahead, to follow up, one by one, the
consequences of such a break. That it would be final he had no doubt.
There are natures which seem to be drawn closer by dissension, to
depend, for the renewal of understanding, on the spark of generosity and
compunction that anger strikes out of both; but Amherst knew that
between himself and his wife no such clearing of the moral atmosphere
was possible. The indignation which left him with tingling nerves and a
burning need of some immediate escape into action, crystallized in Bessy
into a hard kernel of obstinacy, into which, after each fresh collision,
he felt that a little more of herself had been absorbed.... No, the
break between them would be final--if he went now he would not come
back. And it flashed across him that this solution might have been
foreseen by his wife--might even have been deliberately planned and led
up to by those about her. His father-in-law had never liked him--the
disturbing waves of his activity had rippled even the sheltered surface
of Mr. Langhope's existence. He must have been horribly in their way!
Well--it was not too late to take himself out of it. In Bessy's circle