e knew well enough what the admonition meant. To Amherst, so long
thwarted in his chosen work, the subject of Westmore was becoming an
_idee fixe_; and it was natural that Hanaford should class him as a man
of one topic. But Justine had guessed at his other side; a side as long
thwarted, and far less articulate, which she intended to wake into life.
She had felt it in him from the first, though their talks had so
uniformly turned on the subject which palled on Hanaford; and it had
been revealed to her during the silent hours among his books, when she
had grown into such close intimacy with his mind.

She did not, assuredly, mean to spend the rest of her days talking about
the Westmore mill-hands; but in the arrogance of her joy she wished to
begin her married life in the setting of its habitual duties, and to
achieve the victory of evoking the secret unsuspected Amherst out of the
preoccupied business man chained to his task. Dull lovers might have to
call on romantic scenes to wake romantic feelings; but Justine's
glancing imagination leapt to the challenge of extracting poetry from
the prose of routine.

And this was precisely the triumph that the first months brought her. To
mortal eye, Amherst and Justine seemed to be living at Hanaford: in
reality they were voyaging on unmapped seas of adventure. The seas were
limitless, and studded with happy islands: every fresh discovery they
made about each other, every new agreement of ideas and feelings,
offered itself to these intrepid explorers as a friendly coast where
they might beach their keel and take their bearings. Thus, in the
thronging hum of metaphor, Justine sometimes pictured their relation;
seeing it, again, as a journey through crowded populous cities, where
every face she met was Amherst's; or, contrarily, as a multiplication of
points of perception, so that one became, for the world's contact, a
surface so multitudinously alive that the old myth of hearing the grass
grow and walking the rainbow explained itself as the heightening of
personality to the utmost pitch of sympathy.

In reality, the work at Westmore became an almost necessary sedative
after these flights into the blue. She felt sometimes that they would
have been bankrupted of sensations if daily hours of drudgery had not
provided a reservoir in which fresh powers of enjoyment could slowly
gather. And their duties had the rarer quality of constituting,
precisely, the deepest, finest bond between