he regarded the idea that he must go back to them to read and sit and
live in them, showed him how utterly his life had become bound up with
the house on Twenty-seventh Street.

"Where was he to go in the evening?" he asked himself, with pathetic
hopelessness, "or in the morning or afternoon for that matter?" Were
there to be no more of those journeys to picture-galleries and to the
big publishing houses, where they used to hover over the new book
counter and pull the books about, and make each other innumerable
presents of daintily bound volumes, until the clerks grew to know them
so well that they never went through the form of asking where the
books were to be sent? And those tete-a-tete luncheons at her house
when her mother was upstairs with a headache or a dressmaker, and the
long rides and walks in the Park in the afternoon, and the rush down
town to dress, only to return to dine with them, ten minutes late
always, and always with some new excuse, which was allowed if it was
clever, and frowned at if it was common-place--was all this really
over?

Why, the town had only run on because she was in it, and as he walked
the streets the very shop windows had suggested her to him--florists
only existed that he might send her flowers, and gowns and bonnets in
the milliners' windows were only pretty as they would become her; and
as for the theatres and the newspapers, they were only worth while as
they gave her pleasure. And he had given all this up, and for what, he
asked himself, and why?

He could not answer that now. It was simply because he had been
surfeited with too much content, he replied, passionately. He had not
appreciated how happy he had been. She had been too kind, too