y living would restore her
to sanity. Their meetings had been affairs of violence. In her presence
he always felt a rage against what he called her neurasthenia--a word he
frequently used in drawing up bills for divorce. He regarded
neurasthenia not as a disease to be condoned like the mumps, but as a
deliberate failing--particularly in Rachel. The neurasthenia of the
defendants he pursued in courts annoyed him only slightly. In Rachel it
outraged him. It was his habit to inform her that her sufferings were
nothing more than affectations and that her moods were shams and that
the whole was a part and parcel of neurasthenia.

This unhappy desire of his to browbeat her into a state which he defined
as normal, Rachel had accepted in numb helplessness. She had given up
commanding him to leave her alone. His presence frequently became a
nausea. Her enfevered senses had come to perceive in the conventionally
clothed and spoken figure of the young attorney, a concentration of the
repugnant things before which she cowered. During his courtship he had
grown familiar to her as a penalty and his visits had become climaxes of
loathsomeness.

But a stability of purpose peculiar to unsensitive and egoistic young
men kept Hazlitt to his quest. His steady rise in his profession, the
growing respect of his fellows for his name, fired him with a sense of
success. Rachel had become the victim of this sense. Of all the men she
knew Hazlitt grew to be the most unnecessary. But his persistence seemed
to increase with her aversion for him. In a sort of mental self-defense
against the nervous disgust he brought her, she forced herself to think
of him and even to argue with him. By thinking of him she was able to
keep the memory of him an impersonal one, and to convert him from an
emotionally unbearable influence into an intellectually insufferable
type. A conversion by which Hazlitt profited, for she tolerated him more
easily as a result of her ruse. She thought of him. His youth was fast
entrenching itself in platitudes and acquiring the vigor and directness
that come as a reward of conformity. Life was nothing to wonder at or
feel. Life shaped itself into definite images and inelastic values
before him. To these images and values he conformed, not submissively,
but with a militant enthusiasm. On summer mornings he saw himself as a
knight of virtue advancing clear-eyed upon a bedeviled world. When he
was among his own kind he summed up the b