“It’s ended. This will be my life from now on—a life of work. The other, the old associations, the old friends are gone,” he said to himself. “I have cut myself off from all that—whatever happens. I have done the right thing. I can never leave her now—no matter what happens. This is final; this is what I wanted.”
It was done, and he had wished it done. Yet he was surprised at the stir in him which the realization had brought, and, though he was angry at himself, he was conscious of a certain unreasoning rebellion, not so much at the fact that his marriage meant to him the seeking of another world but that his freedom of choice had ended. The feeling seemed to him almost disloyalty. He hated himself for entertaining it, and then he glanced at Inga, sitting so straight and grave by his side, and wondered curiously if such secret thoughts could live behind the brooding of her eyes.
“What a rabble, what an insanity of noise and ugliness!” he said, at last, glancing out the window at the torpid, living masses in the street, and the ugly, vacant masses above, which shut out the sky. “Thank God, we’re getting away to something clean and real!”
She nodded.
“I’m glad.”
And this was all they said to each other—until they had gone through the flurry of the station and found their compartment. The porter stowed their bags, glanced at them with a smile, and went out, closing the door. Presently the train began to move, and something black and stifling closed about them. The same gravity still lay upon her, the same faraway brooding in her eyes. All at once, at the compelling touch of his hand, her glance met his, and then her lips smiled bravely.
“Doesn’t it seem strange to you?” he said quietly.
“Very.”
“I feel as if I have done the last thing I wanted to do—brought sorrow into your life,” he said, in despair. “I don’t know; I can’t understand—you seem to have gone further from me than ever before.”
She looked at him again, with the same intense, prophetic scrutiny she had given him after the ceremony. Then she put out her hand and drew his into the warm shelter of hers.