meals. I saw a moth flying in my closet to-day...."

Judith pushed the letter away, fidgeted, yet smiled. How well they
knew each other. And they used it only to sting and bully! Surely it
could be put to better purpose. Had she tried _everything_? Had
Sam fully understood? Sometimes she thought her early excuses had hurt
too much for her to admit their truth: much of his unkindness was not
intentional, only stupid; slow sympathy, dull sensibility; he did not
suffer, nor comprehend, like a savage or a child. If the possibility
of separation was new to her, would not he never have thought of it at
all? But now, might he not see? Was not his unwonted self-defence
itself admission of new enlightenment and approachability?

She sat long in the increasing dusk. Exhausted with struggle,
loneliness was on her, crying need of the children, return to the
consideration of many things. Admitting that at times it was right to
break everything, wrong not to, it was at least the last resort. Love,
of course, was over irrevocably; but were there not some things worth
saving? Could not she and Sam find some working basis?

What had made their being together most intolerable to her was their
persistence in the religion of a vanished god in whose empty
ceremonies alone they could now take part together. Of the sacred
image nothing was left but the feet of clay. Freed of that
desecration, she could cure or endure everything else; her
obligations, moreover, would hardly conflict at all.

Looking back at the pressures of nature, society, events, Sam's
persistence, she wondered at times if, from the beginning, she had
been any more responsible for her marriage than for the color of her