w that he had
actually removed it from the wall he could not replace it, so he opened
the closet door and thrust it into a corner among relics which had found
refuge there. He had put his past in the closet; yet the relief he felt
was mingled with the peculiar qualm that follows the discovery of
symptoms never before remarked. Why should this woman have this
extraordinary effect of making him dissatisfied with himself? He sat down
again and tried to review the affair from that first day when he had
surprised in her eyes the flame dwelling in her. She had completely upset
his life, increasingly distracted his mind until now he could imagine no
peace unless he possessed her. Hitherto he had recognized in his feeling
for her nothing but that same desire he had had for other women,
intensified to a degree never before experienced. But this sudden access
of morality--he did not actually define it as such--was disquieting. And
in the feverish, semi-objective survey he was now making of his emotional
tract he was discovering the presence of other disturbing symptoms such
as an unwonted tenderness, a consideration almost amounting to pity which
at times he had vaguely sensed yet never sought imaginatively to grasp.
It bewildered him by hampering a ruthlessness hitherto absolute. The
fierceness of her inflamed his passion, yet he recognized dimly behind
this fierceness an instinct of self-protection--and he thought of her in
this moment as a struggling bird that fluttered out of his hands when
they were ready to close over her. So it had been to-night. He might have
kept her, prevented her from taking the car. Yet he had let her go! There
came again, utterly to blot this out, the memory of her lips.

Even then, there had been something sorrowful in that kiss, a quality he
resented as troubling, a flavour that came to him after the wildness was
spent. What was she struggling against? What was behind her resistance?
She loved him! It had never before occurred to him to enter into the
nature of her feelings, having been so preoccupied with and tortured by
his own. This realization, that she loved him, as it persisted, began to
make him uneasy, though it should, according to all experience, have been
a reason for sheer exultation. He began to see that with her it involved
complications, responsibilities, disclosures, perhaps all of those things
he had formerly avoided and resented in woman. He thought of certain
friends of his who ha