He had a right to love, and it was to be eternally denied to him. He would go on bitterly grieved and shamed to think that nobody could love him, for Charity had repulsed him, and some day he would learn that Kedzie had deceived him.
Lacking the courage to warn him against his wife, Charity felt that she must have at least the courage to say;
“Good-by, Jim. I have been loving you of late with a great love.”
There would be no injury done to Kedzie thus, for Charity would speak as a ghost, an impalpable departed one. There would be no sin—only a beautiful expiation by confession. She was enfranchised of earthly restraints, enfranchised as the dead are from mortal obligations.
But the moods that are so holy, so pure, and so vast while they are moods resent words. Words are like tin cups to carry the ocean in. It is no longer an ocean when a bit of it is scooped up. It is only a little brackish water, odious to drink and quenching no thirst.
Charity could not devise the first phrase of her huge and oceanic emotion. It would have been only a proffer of brine that Jim could not have relished from her. He understood better her silence. They went blindly on and on, letting the road lead them and the first whim decide which turn to take and which to pass.
And so they were eventually lost in the land as they were lost in their mood.
And after a time of wonderful enthusiasms in their common grief the realities began to claim them back. A loud report like a pistol-shot announced that the poetry of motion had become prose.
Jim stopped the car and became a blacksmith while he went through the tool-box, found a jack for the wheel, laboriously unshipped the demountable rim, replaced it with the extra wheel, and set forth again.
The job had not improved the cleanliness of his hands nor spared the chastity of his shirt-bosom. But the car had four wheels to go on, and they regained a main road at last and found a signboard announcing, “Tiverton, 18 miles.” That meant thirty miles to Newport.