, was so great that it
seemed to demand some sudden and violent outlet of physical movement.

He thrust the letter in his pocket, took up his hat, and leaving the
house, strode up Fifth Avenue toward the Park in the early spring
sunlight.

The news had taken five days to reach him, for in order to reestablish
communication with his wife he had been obliged to write to Michigan,
with the request that his letter should be forwarded. He had never
supposed that Justine would be hard to find, or that she had purposely
enveloped her movements in mystery. When she ceased to write he had
simply concluded that, like himself, she felt the mockery of trying to
keep up a sort of distant, semi-fraternal relation, marked by the
occasional interchange of inexpressive letters. The inextricable
mingling of thought and sensation which made the peculiar closeness of
their union could never, to such direct and passionate natures, be
replaced by the pretense of a temperate friendship. Feeling thus
himself, and instinctively assuming the same feeling in his wife,
Amherst had respected her silence, her wish to break definitely with
their former life. She had written him, in the autumn, that she intended
to leave Michigan for a few months, but that, in any emergency, a letter
addressed to her friend's house would reach her; and he had taken this
as meaning that, unless the emergency arose, she preferred that their
correspondence should cease. Acquiescence was all the easier because it
accorded with his own desire. It seemed to him, as he looked back, that
the love he and Justine had felt for each other was like some rare
organism which could maintain life only in its special element; and that
element was neither passion nor sentiment, but truth. It was only on the
heights that they could breathe.

Some men, in his place, even while accepting the inevitableness of the
moral rupture, would have felt concerned for the material side of the
case. But it was characteristic of Amherst that this did not trouble
him. He took it for granted that his wife would return to her nursing.
From the first he had felt certain that it would be intolerable to her
to accept aid from him, and that she would choose rather to support
herself by the exercise of her regular profession; and, aside from such
motives, he, who had always turned to hard work as the rarest refuge
from personal misery, thought it natural that she should seek the same
means of escape.

He