All of the night, he lay wakeful and rocked in the fever of decision which had been now so glamorously announced to him,—and so treacherously made without him, since in truth, within him.
He awoke aching and broken and inflamed. His serenity was gone. The mask, in which he had careered all of these months so featly and so gracefully through life, was burned away. He stumbled now against the meanest barrier. The least of his duties reared itself into a crucifix. He suffered. And he struggled. Even so, struggles the beast after the trap has inexorably set.
In his pain, he ran about seeking solace. Yet, wherever he turned, he rejected help. He was afraid of Julia. In fact, she seemed scarcely at all in his mind. It was an effort to think of her. He had to force his brain to grasp the fact of her reality; and a concrete vision of what and how she was, became impossible. In his dreams, there was a looming, aching mass of agony which menaced him, or turned into a bath of luscious poison. This, he termed “Julia.” But it was not really she. It was an inchoate Thing—a thing untinged with the fixed meaning of a woman, a thing at most that a woman had engendered.
So, fearing her, ignoring her, hoping for balm from her, not recking of her really, he at last sought her out.
At once, before her, his storm subsided and became unreal; the swollen waves rolled languorously without aim or meaning.
Even now, he scarcely saw her—and knew her not at all. The time of consciousness was passed.
But it was sweet still, to be before her—helpless, mute,—while her smile glanced on him and her little, intimate movements,—the touch of her hand on her hair or the quiver of her eyelid,—cut through him like steel and played upon him like soft fingers upon a harp.
In this way, pent-up, giving nothing out, came June.
Quincy’s life rushed into summer, as a swift stream falls over a smooth precipice....