It was a curious trait in Philip’s character that he never knew the precise moment when he abandoned a course or an idea. He always had a sense of shock in discovering that he had done so. He believed himself the most consistent and unchangeable of mortals, and every change of front that he discovered in himself shocked him, as a remarkable deviation from his normal steadfastness.
Eweretta had (so he believed) been dead a year, and his heart lay buried with her. He had wept genuine tears upon her grave. He had vowed himself to bachelorhood for her sake.
Yet had Philip been other than he was, had he in any way been a critic of the workings of that complex machine which was his personality, he would have discovered that it was but an intermittent, uncertain light which now remained of the flame of love called up by the pretty Canadian girl. He would have found it out by the fact that the actual sight of his love’s living image (though he had believed it to be only Aimée) had not moved him more. He had not had any urgent desire to see Aimée again because she was like Eweretta.
He would have found it out in his keen interest in life about him, in his work, in his active resentment of his mother’s possible remarriage.
A dead heart is apathetic.
Philip walked back across the field with a sense of elation, because the spirit of his work was active once more.
His eyes wandered happily over the moonlit cornfields at Pickett’s Farm, where the shocks stood like miniature tents of a soldier’s camp. Waiting for the morrow were these tent-like shocks, for the wagons would be coming at dawn to carry them away to be stacked.
At dawn Philip would go to bed, leaving a pile of fair manuscript upon the desk in that cosy room—half dining-, half sitting-room.
Philip had said to himself that within this room he could sit and nurse his sorrow after work was over. As yet here he had seldom thought upon it, and had sometimes quite forgotten it.
Yet, had anyone dared to tell this young man that he was getting over his loss with surprising rapidity, he would have been indignant.