ifficult
to disguise even in written speech. Could it be possible after all that
had happened that Maude still loved me? I continually put the thought
away from me, but continually it returned to haunt me. Suppose Maude
could not help loving me, in spite of my weaknesses and faults, even as I
loved Nancy in spite of hers? Love is no logical thing.

It was Matthew I wanted, Matthew of whom I thought, and trivial,
long-forgotten incidents of the past kept recurring to me constantly. I
still received his weekly letters; but he did not ask why, since I had
taken a vacation, I had not come over to them. He represented the medium,
the link between Maude and me that no estrangement, no separation could
break.

All this new vision of mine was for him, for the coming generation, the
soil in which it must be sown, the Americans of the future. And who so
well as Matthew, sensitive yet brave, would respond to it? I wished not
only to give him what I had begun to grasp, to study with him, to be his
companion and friend, but to spare him, if possible, some of my own
mistakes and sufferings and punishments. But could I go back? Happy
coincidences of desires and convictions had been so characteristic of
that other self I had been struggling to cast off: I had so easily been
persuaded, when I had had a chance of getting Nancy, that it was the
right thing to do! And now, in my loneliness, was I not growing just as
eager to be convinced that it was my duty to go back to the family which
in the hour of self-sufficiency I had cast off? I had believed in divorce
then--why not now? Well, I still believed in it. I had thought of a union
with Nancy as something that would bring about the "self-realization that
springs from the gratification of a great passion,"--an appealing phrase
I had read somewhere. But, it was at least a favourable symptom that I
was willing now to confess that the "self-realization" had been a
secondary and sentimental consideration, a rosy, self-created halo to
give a moral and religious sanction to my desire. Was I not trying to do
that very thing now? It tortured me to think so; I strove to achieve a
detached consideration of the problem,--to arrive at length at a thought
that seemed illuminating: that the it "wrongness" or "rightness," utility
and happiness of all such unions depend upon whether or not they become a
part of the woof and warp of the social fabric; in other words, whether
the gratification of any parti