reached a deadlock. Each will was wound tense, and so fixed.
Fixed! There was neither any relaxing or any increase of pressure.
Fixed. Hard like a numbness, a grip that was solidifying and turning to
stone.

He realised, somehow, that at this terrible passive game of fixed
tension she would beat him. Her fixed female soul, her wound-up female
will would solidify into stone--whereas his must break. In him
something must break. It was a cold and fatal deadlock, profitless. A
life-automatism of fixed tension that suddenly, in him, did break. His
will flew loose in a recoil: a recoil away from her. He left her, as
inevitably as a broken spring flies out from its hold.

Not that he was broken. He would not do her even that credit. He had
only flown loose from the old centre-fixture. His will was still entire
and unabated. Only he did not know: he did not understand. He swung
wildly about from place to place, as if he were broken.

Then suddenly, on this Sunday evening in the strange country, he
realised something about himself. He realised that he had never intended
to yield himself fully to her or to anything: that he did not intend
ever to yield himself up entirely to her or to anything: that his very
being pivoted on the fact of his isolate self-responsibility, aloneness.
His intrinsic and central aloneness was the very centre of his being.
Break it, and he broke his being. Break this central aloneness, and he
broke everything. It was the great temptation, to yield himself: and
it was the final sacrilege. Anyhow, it was something which, from his
profoundest soul, he did not intend to do. By the innermost isolation
and singleness of his own soul he would abide though the skies fell on
top of one another, and seven heavens collapsed.

Vaguely he realised this. And vaguely he realised that this had been the
root cause of his strife with Lottie: Lottie, the only person who had
mattered at all to him in all the world: save perhaps his mother. And
his mother had not mattered, no, not one-half nor one-fifth what Lottie
had mattered. So it was: there was, for him, only her significant in the
universe. And between him and her matters were as they were.

He coldly and terribly hated her, for a moment. Then no more. There was
no solution. It was a situation without a solution. But at any rate, it
was now a defined situation. He could rest in peace.

Thoughts something in this manner ran through Aaron's subconscious mind
as he