"What a mess!"
He knew love now for what it was, knew it for something more ancient
and more imperative than reason. He knew now that he loved her, and
his recent rage, his hostility, his condemnation of her seemed to him
the reign of some exterior influence in his mind. He thought
incredulously of the long decline in tenderness that had followed the
first days of their delight in each other, the diminution of
endearment, the first yielding to irritability, the evenings he had
spent doggedly working, resisting all his sense of her presence. "One
cannot always be love-making," he had said, and so they were slipping
apart. Then in countless little things he had not been patient, he had
not been fair. He had wounded her by harshness, by unsympathetic
criticism, above all by his absurd secrecy about Miss Heydinger's
letters. Why on earth had he kept those letters from her? as though
there was something to hide! What was there to hide? What possible
antagonism could there be? Yet it was by such little things that
their love was now like some once valued possession that had been in
brutal hands, it was scratched and chipped and tarnished, it was on
its way to being altogether destroyed. Her manner had changed towards
him, a gulf was opening that he might never be able to close again.
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