l coil
was broken, and if he did not follow her now she would understand that
it was broken. He had wanted freedom this long while. They had come to
the end of the second period, and there are three--a year of mystery
and passion, and then some years of passion without mystery. The third
period is one of resignation. The lives of the parents pass into the
children, and the mated journey on, carrying their packs. Seldom,
indeed, the man and the woman weary of the life of passion at the same
time and turn instinctively into the way of resignation like animals.
Sometimes it is the man who turns first, sometimes it is the woman. In
this case it was the man. He had his work to do, and Ellen had her
child to think of, and each must think of his and her task from
henceforth. Their tasks were not the same. Each had a different task;
she had thrown, or tried to throw, his pack from his shoulders. She had
thwarted him, or, tried to thwart him. He grew angry as he thought of
what she had done. She had gone into his study and read his papers, and
she had then betrayed him to a priest. He lay awake thinking how he had
been deceived by Ellen; thinking that he had been mistaken; that her
character was not the noble character he had imagined. But at the
bottom of his heart he was true to the noble soul that religion could
not extinguish nor even his neglect.

She said one day: "Is it because I read your manuscript and told the
priest, that you would not come to my room, or is it because you are
tired of me?"

"I cannot tell you; and, really, this conversation is very painful. I
am engaged upon my work, and I have no thoughts for anything but it."
Another time when he came from the piano and sat opposite to her she
raised her eyes from her sewing and sat looking at him, and then
getting up suddenly she put her hands to her forehead and said to
herself: "I will conquer this," and she went out of the room.

And from that day she did not trouble him with love. She obtained
control over herself, and he remembered a mistress who had ceased to
love him, and he had persecuted her for a long while with supplication.
"She is at one with herself always," he said, and he tried to
understand her. "She is one of those whose course through life is
straight, and not zig-zag, as mine is." He liked to see her turn and
look at the baby, and he said, "That love is the permanent and original
element of things, it is the universal substance;" and he coul