-possessed lover is more
preposterous!

Your book has not yet reached me. To-morrow I shall write again,
providing I remember how to write a natural letter.

Yours,
DANE KEMPTON.

XXIII

FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME

LONDON.
June 20, 19--.

There are impersonal hours when the things of the day drop below
consciousness and the spirit grows devotional and wends a pilgrimage to
larger spheres, there to sit apart. Such a respite was mine to-day.
There had been a call to rouse and put forth work, and I wrought with
all the puniness of my might (woe is me!), and earned my post at the
window that looks out upon the large things. The best of nights and days
of toil is that there comes a twilight in which fatigued eyes see clear.
I said it did not matter how you do about your marriage. Time may right
you in a way I cannot know. I said it did not matter if you are not
righted in this, there being so much that never rights itself. Both hope
and despair were followed by a calm of neutrality. The inquiry waited
no solution. The stress no longer touched me, and my twilight became
luminous. I saw things as from a height and forms dropped out of my
range, when Barbara came tugging at me, and my pale while of abstraction
was at an end.

She wanted to know what troubled me. She made her way to me, hurried but
resolved, and stated her demand. "You catechised me yesterday; to-night
you shall answer."

She had come to defend herself. My talk having of late taken on the
sameness of that of the man of one idea, Barbara was aroused. I was
gauging her because she distressed me, was her thought. (I had been
trying to find whether it is possible to live differently from her and
live happily and well.) "You think I am not close enough to Earl,
because I mourn for my little one, perhaps. You think me not
sufficiently happy to be wifely." Could I suppose aught else from such
an utterance but that there was an estrangement and hidden pain? How,
unless there were sorrow, could the woman see herself sorrowed for? My
mind leapt to possibilities. Little Barbara on the rack was more than I
could bear. I groped for her hands. It was a fault in her to be so much
on her guard. She had no sorrow to confess, and spoke--only to ward off
what was not directed toward her.

"The tenour of your talk led me on to believe--" she stammered with hot
cheeks. It is a standing offence of hers to imagine herself accused, and
she admits it is a weakness