k
when I reached my room, and the mail left at four. I began to copy and
revise my scrawl, glancing from time to time at my watch, which I had
laid on the table. Hurriedly washing my face and brushing my hair, I
arrived downstairs just as the stage was leaving....

After the letter had gone still other arguments I might have added began
to occur to me, and I regretted that I had not softened some of the
things I wrote and made others more emphatic. In places argument had
degenerated into abject entreaty. Never had my desire been so importunate
as now, when I was in continual terror of losing her. Nor could I see how
I was to live without her, life lacking a motive being incomprehensible:
yet the fire of optimism in me, though died down to ashes, would not be
extinguished. At moments it flared up into what almost amounted to a
conviction that she could not resist my appeal. I had threatened to go to
her, and more than once I started packing....

Three days later I received a brief note in which she managed to convey
to me, though tenderly and compassionately, that her decision was
unalterable. If I came on, she would refuse to see me. I took the
afternoon stage and went back to the city, to plunge into affairs again;
but for weeks my torture was so acute that it gives me pain to recall it,
to dwell upon it to-day.... And yet, amazing as it may seem, there came a
time when hope began to dawn again out of my despair. Perhaps my life had
not been utterly shattered, after all: perhaps Ham Durrett would get
well: such things happened, and Nancy would no longer have an excuse for
continuing to refuse me. Little by little my anger at what I had now
become convinced was her weakness cooled, and--though paradoxically I had
continued to love her in spite of the torture for which she was
responsible, in spite of the resentment I felt, I melted toward her. True
to my habit of reliance on miracles, I tried to reconcile myself to a
period of waiting.

Nevertheless I was faintly aware--consequent upon if not as a result of
this tremendous experience--of some change within me. It was not only
that I felt at times a novel sense of uneasiness at being a prey to
accidents, subject to ravages of feeling; the unity of mind that had
hitherto enabled me to press forward continuously toward a concrete goal
showed signs of breaking up:--the goal had lost its desirability. I
seemed oddly to be relapsing into the states of questioning that had