And she consoled him with vague hopes and hurried promises, with only one desire in her heart—to get away and hide herself like a wounded animal. It was a physical blow that he had dealt her, something that left no place for thought, that made her consciousness all pain. Talking only tortured her, she could not reason about it. She could not think, she could only see images and pictures that turned her brain. …
Now, in the solitude she had craved, she was beginning to think. What had happened, then, after all? Had he not, in spite of his passionate denials, been false to the spirit of their compact, to their egoistic, purely personal relation? Had he not shaken the foundations of that relation, and was not its whole structure falling in ruins? If so, somehow she must build up her life anew, without love, the keystone. Love, as she loved, him, meant complete spiritual possession, complete confidence, or unhappiness. She would not resign herself to unhappiness, to taking up their life on a lower plane. She knew what would happen—she foresaw endless suspicion, sordid quarrels, "nagging." No, rather than that, rather than a constant demand for what he could not freely give, she would live somehow without him. But as yet she did not see how that could be done. She had left herself no substitutes. She had put too much into her feeling for him.
