"I wonder what he meant by that about temperament?" She sighed again. "Sometimes I think the worry and everything are turning David's temper sour. I wish—I wish he were like other men. He doesn't realize how trying he is sometimes."
And Shirley being Shirley, she bade Charles drive faster and tried to put
David's unlikeness to other men out of her mind.
David being David, he sat up all night, submitting to his cure for temperament. He was facing the truth from which he had been hiding ever since Shirley went away. His heavy sense of loss had been defined.
A little imp with a nasty sneering voice that jabbed like a hot needle perched itself on his shoulder and kept dinning into his ears:
"The truth is, you had nothing to lose but a fancy. Shirley never really loved you. You were only one of her toys, one sort of a good time, and not worth the price. You didn't really love Shirley, only what you thought she was, what you see now she is not. Therefore . . ."
CHAPTER VII
SANCTUARY
Some men fall out of love with their wives as easily and unconcernedly as they fell in. They even feel a sort of relief, thinking a disturbing factor thus removed from their lives, and they live happily ever after. But they are not "temperamental."
It was not so with David. He thought it a tragedy, at least for a while. Even when it had failed him, when it had refused to shine in darkness, itself turned upon him in an hour of need, he had not lost faith in love. He had said in his heart, "At least I have love left, which is worth while in itself; and having that, I can yet work out some sort of happiness for us all." He had clung desperately to that hope, though the evidence was against it.
He had been clinging to an illusion. When he found that out, he had nothing left. He was bewildered by the task of working out a happiness where no love was. How could he rebuild when he had not even wreckage with which to build?