as I look
back upon those days they seem to have lost succession, to be fused
together, as it were, into one indeterminable period by the intense
pressure of emotion; unsatisfied emotion,--and the state of physical and
mental disorganization set up by it is in the retrospect not a little
terrifying. The world grew more and more distorted, its affairs were
neglected, things upon which I had set high values became as nothing. And
even if I could summon back something of the sequence of our intercourse,
it would be a mere repetition--growing on my part more irrational and
insistent--of what I have already related. There were long, troubled, and
futile silences when we sat together on the porch or in the woods and
fields; when I wondered whether it were weakness or strength that caused
Nancy to hold out against my importunities: the fears she professed of
retribution, the benumbing effects of the conventional years, or the
deep-rooted remnants of a Calvinism which--as she proclaimed--had lost
definite expression to persist as an intuition. I recall something she
said when she turned to me after one of these silences.

"Do you know how I feel sometimes? as though you and I had wandered
together into a strange country, and lost our way. We have lost our way,
Hugh--it's all so clandestine, so feverish, so unnatural, so unrelated to
life, this existence we're leading. I believe it would be better if it
were a mere case of physical passion. I can't help it," she went on, when
I had exclaimed against this, "we are too--too complicated, you are too
complicated. It's because we want the morning stars, don't you see?" She
wound her fingers tightly around mine. "We not only want this, but all of
life besides--you wouldn't be satisfied with anything less. Oh, I know
it. That's your temperament, you were made that way, and I shouldn't be
satisfied if you weren't. The time would come when you would blame me I
don't mean vulgarly--and I couldn't stand that. If you weren't that way,
if that weren't your nature, I mean, I should have given way long ago."

I made some sort of desperate protest.

"No, if I didn't know you so well I believe I should have given in long
ago. I'm not thinking of you alone, but of myself, too. I'm afraid I
shouldn't be happy, that I should begin to think--and then I couldn't
stop. The plain truth, as I've told you over and over again, is that I'm
not big enough." She continued smiling at me, a smile on which I c