can't be making love all the time."

"Oh, it isn't that, it isn't that!" she would exclaim passionately. "You
just don't love me, like you ought to. You just don't care. If you did
I'd feel it."

"Oh, Angela," he answered, "why do you talk so? Why do you carry on so?
You're the funniest girl I ever knew. Now be reasonable. Why don't you
bring a little philosophy to bear? We can't be billing and cooing all
the time!"

"Billing and cooing! That's the way you think of it. That's the way you
talk of it! As though it were something you had to do. Oh, I hate love!
I hate life! I hate philosophy! I wish I could die."

"Now, Angela, for Heaven's sake, why will you take on so? I can't stand
this. I can't stand these tantrums of yours. They're not reasonable. You
know I love you. Why, haven't I shown it? Why should I have married you
if I didn't? I wasn't obliged to marry you!"

"Oh, dear! oh, dear!" Angela would sob on, wringing her hands. "Oh, you
really don't love me! You don't care! And it will go on this way,
getting worse and worse, with less and less of love and feeling until
after awhile you won't even want to see me any more--you'll hate me! Oh,
dear! oh, dear!"

Eugene felt keenly the pathos involved in this picture of decaying love.
In fact, her fear of the disaster which might overtake her little bark
of happiness was sufficiently well founded. It might be that his
affection would cease--it wasn't even affection now in the true sense of
the word,--a passionate intellectual desire for her companionship. He
never had really loved her for her mind, the beauty of her thoughts. As
he meditated he realized that he had never reached an understanding with
her by an intellectual process at all. It was emotional, subconscious, a
natural drawing together which was not based on reason and spirituality
of contemplation apparently, but on grosser emotions and desires.
Physical desire had been involved--strong, raging, uncontrollable. And
for some reason he had always felt sorry for her--he always had. She was
so little, so conscious of disaster, so afraid of life and what it might
do to her. It was a shame to wreck her hopes and desires. At the same
time he was sorry now for this bondage he had let himself into--this
yoke which he had put about his neck. He could have done so much better.
He might have married a woman of wealth or a woman with artistic
perceptions and philosophic insight like Christina Channing, who would
be