eeping.

He found that there was a certain pendulum-swing of mood in Paradise.
Emotion was the being of this mood, and to keep emotion one must swing.

Either he must soothe Kitty or Kitty must soothe him, or they must
transcend the dark necessities of their case by finding in each other a
joy including in its ecstasy the sorrow it obliterated. This pendulum
swung spontaneously during those first weeks, it swung as their hearts
beat, from need to response. And, at the beginning of the third week, it
was not so much a faltering in the need or the response that Holland
knew, as a mere lessening of the swing;--it didn't go quite so fast or
carry him quite so far. He became conscious of an unequal rhythm; Kitty
seemed to swing even faster and further.

She saw him as dead; that was the urgent vision that lay behind her
demonstrations and ministrations; she saw him as more dead with every
day that passed, and every moment of every day was, to her, of
passionate significance. No one had ever been idealised as he was
idealised, or clung to as he was clung to. The sense of desperate
tendrils enlacing him was almost suffocating, and each tendril craved
for recognition; a lapse, a look, an inattention was the cutting of
something that bled, and clung the closer. Every moment was precious,
and any not given to love was a robbery from her dwindling store. As the
time grew less her need for significance grew greater. Her sense of her
own tragedy grew with her sense of his, and he must share both.
Resignation to his fate was a resignation of her, and a crime against
their love. Holland by degrees grew conscious of keeping himself up to a
mark.

It was then that the blossoms began to look a little over-blown, the
paths to become monotonous, the bowers to grow oppressive with their
heavy sweetness as though a noonday sun beat down changelessly upon
them. The dew was gone, and though Kitty remained a primitive Eve, he
himself knew that in his conscious ardour there hovered the vague
presence of something no longer pure, something unwholesome and
enervating.

She saw him as dead, and the thought of death, always with her, renewed
her pity and her adoration; he knew that his own background lent a charm
enthralling and poignant to his every word, look and gesture. But for
him this charm and this renewal were lacking. He could not feel such
pity, either for her or for himself. She was to live, poor little Kitty,
and, by degrees, the t