The Wheel of Life

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

"But I've seen nothing of you at all," he urged, "put Gerty aside—she won't mind. If she does, tell her I made you do it."

She shook her head, shrinking slightly away from him in the street. "It isn't that, but I want to be alone—to think. Come this evening and I'll be quite myself again. Only just now I—I can't talk."

In the end he had yielded, overborne by so unusual a spirit of opposition; and with a reproachful good-bye he had returned to his rooms, while she went slowly up the street in the pale autumn sunshine.

The impulse in which she had gone to him had utterly died down; and she asked herself, with a curiosity that was almost indifferent, why, since the reconciliation she had longed for was now complete, she should feel only melancholy where she had expected to find happiness? Kemper had never been more impassioned, had never shown himself to be more thoroughly the lover—yet in some way she admitted, it had all been different from the deeper reunion she had hoped for; there had come to her even while she lay in his arms that strange, though familiar sense of unreality in her own emotion; and beneath the touch of his hands she had felt herself to be separated from him by the space of a whole inner world. Though she appeared to have got everything, she realised, with a pang of resentment directed against herself, that she had wanted a great deal more than he had had the power to bestow. Could it be that the thing she had missed was that finer sympathy of spirit without which all human passion is but the withered husk where the flower has never bloomed?

"Is it true that I must be forever content with the mere gesture of love?" she thought. "Is it true that I shall never reach his soul, which is surely there if I could but find it? Has it eluded me, after all, only because I did not know the way?"

This longing for the immortal soul of love seized her like an unquenchable thirst, until it seemed to her that all outward forms of expression—all embraces all words—were but dead earthly things until the breath of the spirit had entered in to raise them from mere trivial accidents into eternal symbols.

Then suddenly she understood, for the first time, that she had humiliated herself by going to his rooms, and she felt her cheek burn in remembering a step which she had taken, under the stress of feeling, without an instant's hesitation. It seemed to her now, when she looked back upon it, that it would have been better to have lost him forever than to have lowered her pride in the way that she had done—but before seeing him her pride had been nothing to her, and she realised that if she felt his affection slipping from her again she would be driven to the same or even to greater lengths of self-abasement.

"But I did wrong—I have lowered myself forever in his eyes," she thought, "he can never feel the same respect for me again, and because I have lost his respect I have lost also my power to keep him constant to me in his heart."

With the confession, she was aware that a spiritual battle took place within her, and she thought of her soul, not as one but as multiple—as consisting of hosts of good and evil angels who warred against one another without ceasing. And she felt assured that presently the good or the evil host would be vanquished and that henceforth she would belong to the victorious side forever—not for this life only, but for a thousand lives and an eternal evolution along the course which she herself had chosen. A passage she had once read in an old book occurred to her, and she recalled that the writer had spoken of God as "the place of the soul." If this were so, had she not filled that place which is God with a confusion in which there was only terror and disorder.

"Why has it all happened as it has?" she demanded almost in despair. "Why did I love him in the beginning? Why did I humiliate myself in his eyes to-day?" But her motives, which appeared only as impulses, were still shrouded in the obscurity of her ignorance; and the one thing that remained clear to her was that she had struggled breathlessly for the happiness she had not possessed. Was it this desire for happiness, she asked, which had returned to her now in the form of an avenging fury?