long engagements seldom mean marriage. When--"

He put the cobwebs aside with a strain of will, for he was very tired in
body, and settled himself to write to Nancy. It was not the cobwebs that
hurt. The only thing that mattered was that she had been hurt on his
account--was being hurt now on his account--would be hurt, and still and
always on his account, not because he wanted to hurt her but because it was
not within his power, but Life's, to hurt her in that respect or not.

"Oh, felicitous Nancy!" the pen began to scratch. "Your letter--"

Stupid to be so tired when he was writing to Nancy. Stupid not to find the
right things to say at once when you wanted to say them so much. He dropped
the pen an instant, sat back, and tried to evoke Nancy before him like
a small, clear picture seen in a lens, tried to form with his will the
lifeless air in front of him till it began to take on some semblance and
body of her that would be better than the tired remembrances of the mind.

Often, and especially when he had thought about her intensely for a
long time, the picture would not come at all or come with tantalizing
incompleteness, apparently because he wanted it to be whole so much--all he
could see would be a wraith of Nancy, wooden as a formal photograph, with
none of her silences or mockeries about her till he felt like a painter who
has somehow let the devil into his paintbox so that each stroke he makes
goes a little fatally out of true from the vision in his mind till the
canvas is only a crazy-quilt of reds and yellows. Now, perhaps, though, she
might come, even though he was tired. He pressed the back of a hand against
his eyes. She was coming to him now. He remembered one of their walks
together--a walk they had taken some eight months ago, when they had been
only three days engaged. Up Fifth Avenue; Forty-second Street, Forty-third,