upon him; everything that she had said or looked, was hourly and daily
sweeter and dearer; her truth was intoxicating, beyond the lures of other
women, in which the quality of deceit had once fascinated him. Now, so
late in his youthful life, he realized that there was no beauty but that
of truth, and he pledged himself a thousand times that if she should say
she could not live without him he would henceforward live for truth
alone, and not for the truth merely as it was in her, but as it was in
everything. In those day's he learned to know himself, as he never had
before, and to put off a certain shell of worldliness that had grown upon
him. In his remoteness from it, New York became very distasteful to him;
he thought with reluctance of going back to it; his club, which had been
his home, now appeared a joyless exile; the life of a leisure class,
which he had made his ideal, looked pitifully mean and little in the
retrospect; he wondered how he could have valued the things that he had
once thought worthy. He did not know what he should replace it all with,
but Rosalie would know, in the event of not being able to live without
him. In that event there was hardly any use of which he could not be
capable. In any other event--he surprised himself by realizing that in
any other event--still the universe had somehow more meaning than it once
had. Somehow, he felt himself an emancipated man.

He began many letters to Rosalie, and some he finished and some not, but
he sent none; and when her letter came at last, he was glad that he had
waited for it in implicit trust of its coming, though he believed she
would have forgiven him if he had not had the patience. The letter was
quite what he could have imagined of her. She said that she had put
herself thoroughly to the test, and she could not live without him. But
if he had found out that he could live without her, then she should know
that she had been to blame, and would take her punishment. Apparently in
her philosophy, which now seemed to him so divine, without punishment