But the last months had made a man of him, and when
she came back he would know how to lift her to the height of his
experience.
So he would reason, day by day, as he hastened back to Washington
Square; but when he opened the door, and his first glance at the hall
table showed him there was no letter there, his illusions shrivelled
down to their weak roots. She had not written: she did not mean to
write. He and the boy were no longer a part of her life. When she
came back everything would be as it had been before, with the dreary
difference that she had tasted new pleasures and that their absence
would take the savour from all he had to give her. Then the coming of
another foreign mail would lift his hopes, and as he hurried home he
would imagine new reasons for expecting a letter....
Week after week he swung between the extremes of hope and dejection,
and at last, when the strain had become unbearable, he cabled her. The
answer ran: "Very well best love writing"; but the promised letter never
came....
He went on steadily with his work: he even passed through a phase of
exaggerated energy. But his baffled youth fought in him for air. Was
this to be the end? Was he to wear his life out in useless drudgery? The
plain prose of it, of course, was that the economic situation remained
unchanged by the sentimental catastrophe and that he must go on working
for his wife and child. But at any rate, as it was mainly for Paul that
he would henceforth work, it should be on his own terms and according to
his inherited notions of "straightness.
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