, it was he who made it possible for Ruth
to move a little more freely in the trap in which she found herself. He
helped her in deceiving her family and friends, aided them in the ugly
work of stealing what happiness they could from the society in which
they lived. He did not like doing it. Neither did he like attending the
agonies of child-birth, or standing impotently at the bed of the dying.
It might seem absurd, in trying to explain one's self, to claim for this
love the inevitability of the beginning and the end of life, and yet,
seeing it as he saw it he did think of it, not as a thing that should or
should not be, but as a thing that was; not as life should or should not
be lived, but as life. This much he knew: that whatever they might have
been able to do at the first, it had them now. They were in too powerful
a current to make a well considered retreat to shoals of safety. No
matter what her mood might have been in the beginning, no matter what
she could have done about it then, Ruth was mastered not master now.
Love _had_ her--he saw that too well to reason with her. What he saw of
the way all other people mattered so much less than the passion which
claimed her made him feel, not that Ruth was selfish, but that the
passion was mastering; the way she deceived made him feel, not that she
was deceitful, but that love like that was as unable to be held back in
the thought of wrong to others as in the consideration of safety for
one's self; the two were equally inadequate floodgates. Not that those
other things did not matter--he knew how they did make her suffer--but
that this one thing mattered overwhelmingly more was what he felt in
Ruth in those days when she would be thought to be with him and would be
with Stuart Williams.

For himself that was a year of misery. He saw Ruth in a peculiarly
intimate way, taken as he was into the great intimacy of her life. His
love for her deepened with his knowing of her; and anxiety about her
preyed upon him all the time, passionate resentment that it should have
gone like that for her, life claiming her only, as it seemed, to destroy
her.

He never admitted to himself how much he really came to like Stuart
Williams. There seemed something quixotic in that; it did not seem
natural he should have any sympathy with this man who not only had
Ruth's love, but was endangering her whole life. Yet the truth was that
as time went on he not only came to like him but to feel a gro