defined their position; it occurred to her now that he had managed her
with the skill and coolness of a man who understood women and could keep
his head, even while quickened with all that he inspired. She also
recalled, her lips curling into a cynical grin, that she had felt the
same promptings for spiritual abandonment, of high desire to help this
man where he was weak, to restore some of his lost ideals, or to
replace them with better; to root out the weeds which she recognized in
his nature, and to coax the choked bulbs of those fairer flowers which
may have been there before he and the world knew each other too well.
Then she relived the days and nights of torment when she had walked the
floor wringing her hands, barely eating and sleeping. She recalled that
she had even beaten the walls and flung herself against them.

The procession was startlingly familiar and fresh of lineament; even the
moments of rapture, whose memory is soonest to fade, and the fitful
solace she had found, in those last days, imagining what might have
been.

She got up and walked about the room, half amused, half appalled. "What
does it mean?" she thought. "Is it that there is an impalpable entity in
this world for me, and that part of it is in one man and part in
another? Is the man who has the larger share the one I really love? Is
that the explanation of loving a second time? It certainly is very
like--ridiculously like."

She turned her thoughts to Hedworth, but they swung aside and pointed
straight to the other man. She half expected to see his ghost framed in
the dark window, he seemed so close. She found herself living the past
again and again, instinct with its sensations. He had had much in his
life to cark and harrow, and the old sympathy and tenderness vibrated