he whole of the life that lay before them was a track of gold like that
which blazed across the sea, leading to an intolerable glory.

And there were other hours of equally memorable transfiguration, which
their surroundings had nothing whatever to do with--hours lighted only
by the flame that flared up from their two selves.

But life, of course, can not be made up of hours like that. No sane
person can even want to live in a perpetual ecstasy. What makes a
mountain peak is the fall away into the surrounding valleys.

In their valleys of commonplace, every-day existence--and these
occurred even in their first days together--they were stiff, shy,
self-conscious with each other. And their attempt to ignore this fact
only made the self-consciousness the worse. It troubled and bewildered
both of them.

Rose's misgiving had been justified. They weren't the old Rodney and
Rose. Those two splendid careless savages, who had lived for a fortnight
on an island in the midst of Martin Whitney's carefully preserved
solitude in Northern Wisconsin, accepting the gifts of the gods with
such joyous confidence that none of them could ever turn bitter, those
two zestful children, had ceased to exist.

John Galbraith had spoken truth when he said there was no such thing as
a fresh start. For good or evil, you were the product of your
yesterdays. The nightmare tour on the road with _The Girl Up-stairs_
company was a part of Rose; the day in Centropolis, the night when
Galbraith had made love to her. The hour in the University Club, when
Rodney's heart had first shrunk from an unacknowledged fear; the days
and weeks of humiliation and distress that had succeeded it, were a part
of him--an ineffaceable part.

So it was natural enough--though not, therefore, the less
distressing--that Rose should note, with wonder, a tendency in him to
revert to the manner which had characterized his first call on her in
New York; a tendency to be--of all things--polite. He didn't swear any
more, nor contradict. He chose his words, got up when she did, picked up
things she dropped. And when she was quite sure she was safe from
discovery, she sometimes wept forlornly, for the rough, outrageous,
absent-minded, imperious lover of the old days.

She did not know that she was different too--as remote from the girl she
had been during the first six months of their marriage--the girl who,
"all eyes," had held her breath while Doctor Randolph told her things;