ife with Bessy.
Between himself and Justine, apart from their love for each other, there
was the wider passion for their kind, which gave back to them an
enlarged and deepened reflection of their personal feeling. In such an
air it had seemed that no petty egotism could hamper their growth, no
misintelligence obscure their love; yet all the while this pure
happiness had been unfolding against a sordid background of falsehood
and intrigue from which his soul turned with loathing.

Justine was right in assuming that Amherst had never thought much about
women. He had vaguely regarded them as meant to people that hazy domain
of feeling designed to offer the busy man an escape from thought. His
second marriage, leading him to the blissful discovery that woman can
think as well as feel, that there are beings of the ornamental sex in
whom brain and heart have so enlarged each other that their emotions are
as clear as thought, their thoughts as warm as emotions--this discovery
had had the effect of making him discard his former summary conception
of woman as a bundle of inconsequent impulses, and admit her at a stroke
to full mental equality with her lord. The result of this act of
manumission was, that in judging Justine he could no longer allow for
what was purely feminine in her conduct. It was incomprehensible to him
that she, to whom truth had seemed the essential element of life, should
have been able to draw breath, and find happiness, in an atmosphere of
falsehood and dissimulation. His mind could assent--at least in the
abstract--to the reasonableness of her act; but he was still unable to
understand her having concealed it from him. He could enter far enough
into her feelings to allow for her having kept silence on his first
return to Lynbrook, when she was still under the strain of a prolonged
and terrible trial; but that she should have continued to do so when he
and she had discovered and confessed their love for each other, threw an
intolerable doubt on her whole course.

He stayed late at the mills, finding one pretext after another for
delaying his return to Hanaford, and trying, while he gave one part of
his mind to the methodical performance of his task, to adjust the other
to some definite view of the future. But all was darkened and confused
by the sense that, between himself and Justine, complete communion of
thought was no longer possible. It had, in fact, never existed; there
had always been a locked cha