In the two following months Howard submitted thirty-five articles. Three were published in the main as he wrote them, six were “cut” to paragraphs, one appeared as a letter to the editor with “H” signed to it. The others disappeared. It was not encouraging, but Howard kept on. He knew that if he stopped marching steadily, even though hopelessly, toward a definite goal, a heavy hand would be laid upon his shoulder to drag him away and fling him down upon a grave.
As it was, desperately though he fought to refrain from backward glances, he was now and again taken off his guard. A few of her pencil marks on the margin of a leaf in one of his books; a gesture, a little mannerism of some woman passing him in the street—and he would be ready to sink down with weariness and loneliness, like a tired traveller in a vast desert.
He completely lost self-control only once. It was a cold, wet May night and everything had gone against him that day. He looked drearily round his rooms as he came in. How stiff, how forbidding, how desert they seemed! He threw himself into a big chair.
“No friends,” he thought, “no one that cares a rap whether I live or die, suffer or am happy. Nothing to care for. Why do I go on? What’s the use if one has not an object—a human object?”
And their life together came flooding back—her eyes, her kisses, her attentions, her passionate love for him, so pervasive yet so unobtrusive; the feeling of her smooth, round arm about his neck; her way of pressing close up to him and locking her fingers in his; the music of her voice, singing her heartsong to him yet never putting it into words——
He stumbled over to the divan and stretched himself out and buried his face in the cushions. “Come back!” he sobbed. “Come back to me, dear.” And then he cried, as a man cries—without tears, with sobs choking up into his throat and issuing in moans.
“Curious,” he said aloud when the storm was over and he was sitting up, ashamed before himself for his weakness, “who would have suspected me of this?”