Alice's sake he must keep the impersonal attitude of the legal adviser.
In that way alone could even the semblance of peace be won.

CHAPTER XXVI

ALICE VISITS HANEY

Alice Heath was dying of something far subtler than "the White Death,"
to which Haney so often referred. Tortured by Ben's studied tenderness
when at her side, she suffered doubly when he was away, knowing all too
well that his keenest pleasure now lay in Bertha's companionship. Her
doubt darkened into despair. In certain moments of exaltation she rose
to such heights of impersonal passion as to acknowledge fully,
generously, the claims of youth and health--admitting that she and
Marshall Haney were the offenders and not the young lovers, whose desire
for happiness was but an irresistible manifestation of the mystic force
which binds the generations together.

"Why do we not quietly take ourselves off and make them happy?" she
asked herself. "Of what selfish quality is our love? Here am I only a
spiteful, hopeless invalid--I hate myself, I despise my body and
everything I am. I loathe my wrinkled face, my shrivelled hands, my flat
chest. I am fit only to be bride to death. I'm tired of the world--tired
of everything--and yet I do not die. Why can't I die?"

These moods never soared high enough (or sank quite low enough) to
permit the final severing stroke, and she ended each of them in a flood
of tears, filled with ever-greater longing for the beautiful young lover
whose heart had wandered away from her. It was hard not to welcome him
when he came, but infinitely harder to send him away, for life held no
other solace, the day no other aim.

In her saner moments she was aware of her own misdemeanor. She knew that
her morbid questioning, her ceaseless grievings were wearing away her
vital force, and that no doctor could ever again medicine her to sweet
sleep, that no wind or cloud would bring coolness to her burning brain.
"I am no longer worthy of any man's love," she admitted to her higher
self.

She did not question Ben's honor--he was of those who keep faith. "He
has no hope of ever being other than the distant lover of Bertha Haney,
and he is ready to fulfil his word to me, but I will not permit him to
bind himself to me. It would be a crime to lay upon him the burden of a
wife old before her time, sterile and doomed to a slow decline." She
revolted, too, at the thought of having a husband, whose heart was
elsewhere, whose restless desir