ort until I found
myself panting near the crest of the ridge where there was a pasture,
which some ancient glacier had strewn with great boulders. Beside one of
these I sank. Heralded by the deep tones of bells, two steers appeared
above the shoulder of a hill and stood staring at me with bovine
curiosity, and fell to grazing again. A fleet of white clouds, like ships
pressed with sail, hurried across the sky as though racing for some
determined port; and the shadows they cast along the hillsides
accentuated the high brightness of the day, emphasized the vivid and
hateful beauty of the landscape. My numbness began to be penetrated by
shooting pains, and I grasped little by little the fulness of my
calamity, until I was in the state of wild rebellion of one whom life for
the first time has foiled in a supreme desire. There was no fate about
this thing, it was just an absurd accident. The operation of the laws of
nature had sent a man to the ground: another combination of circumstances
would have killed him, still another, and he would have arisen unhurt.
But because of this particular combination my happiness was ruined, and
Nancy's! She had not expected me to understand. Well, I didn't
understand, I had no pity, in that hour I felt a resentment almost
amounting to hate; I could see only unreasoning superstition in the woman
I wanted above everything in the world. Women of other days had indeed
renounced great loves: the thing was not unheard of. But that this should
happen in these times--and to me! It was unthinkable that Nancy of all
women shouldn't be emancipated from the thralls of religious inhibition!
And if it wasn't "conscience," what was it?

Was it, as she said, weakness, lack of courage to take life when it was
offered her?.... I was suddenly filled with the fever of composing
arguments to change a decision that appeared to me to be the result of a
monstrous caprice and delusion; writing them out, as they occurred to me,
in snatches on the backs of envelopes--her envelopes. Then I proceeded to
make the draft of a letter, the effort required for composition easing me
until the draft was finished; when I started for the hotel, climbing
fences, leaping streams, making my way across rock faces and through
woods; halting now and then as some reenforcing argument occurred to me
to write it into my draft at the proper place until the sheets were
interlined and blurred and almost illegible. It was already three o'cloc