Perhaps, he thought to himself, they had “cut and run.” And for him it became worse, to think that she had gone, without a word, with never a complaint, just gone. He remembered the night when she had said she was miserable, when he had found her in her bed, after the play, with her room in a litter. And he fell to thinking of the trials he must have put upon her, probing for all the possible offences, secret, subtle, unsuspected, of body and soul that might be laid at his door. There were many that he could think of, but his darkest hours came then when he perceived the fine balance, the perilous poise of married life, the imperceptible dovetailing of interests and habits and humors, the regions beyond perception where souls meet. Its nice complications were almost terrifying: at thousands of points men and women might fail, offend each other, crush each other, destroy, never dreaming of the cause, never, at the time, marking the effect. For such an adventure there need be heroism: to break, when even failure and offence and mutual exasperation bind, strength and courage superhuman or despairing. And men judge! And condemn! They measure this subtlest and most searching relationship with opinions and dull compromise and rules.
He was tortured with the thought of all the injuries he might have done her, and he invented more, invented burdens that he had never put upon her to account for her going away from him, with never a word. For three days he lived in this torment, winding about and about from general to particular and back again by the most circuitous route, a Rundreise with the current morality for Baedeker. And every now and then the obsession would stab home to his heart—the hotel door swinging, the flat infidelity. Once, when the pain was so mortal that he could contain himself no longer, he wrote to her at the hotel. He posted the letter. That was on the second day. On the third he was in an agony. No answer came.
On the fourth day a telegram arrived from the Sussex village and an hour later she, brown, healthy, with a grand swing in her walk, a new depth of bosom, a squarer carriage of the shoulders; a rich bloom on her. She kissed his cheek.
He stared and stared at her. He looked for change in her.
“You!”
“Didn’t you get my telegram?”
“Oh! yes.”
“I’ll take my things off, and we’ll have some tea.”
She left him. He stood at the head of the little stairs leading down to her apartments, and he trembled and was near weeping. In her room he could hear her singing to herself, happily, blithely as a bird, with a full note that caught at his heart. She seemed to sing no song, but a melody, young and joyous with a full summer gaiety. The sun shone through the staircase window upon his hand where he clutched the balustrade. He was gripping it so tight that the veins stood out and the skin on his knuckles was white. A tear fell on his hand and he looked down at it. It was a plump, podgy, puckered middle-aged hand.