Her memory flashed back over their not quite two years of life together and she realized that he had always been like that whenever his emotions toward her came into play.  All his finely trained, formidable intelligence had always deserted him here.  She remembered his having told her, the night he’d turned her out of his office, that his mind had to run cold.  She hadn’t really known what he meant.  She saw now that her own mind didn’t run cold, that it never really aroused itself except under the spur of strong emotion.  So that just where he was most helpless, she was at her strongest.  A victory over him in those circumstances, was about as much to feel triumphant over as one over a small child would be.

She realized now, more fully than before, what a crucifixion of his boyish pride it must have been to see her on the stage.  It was no answer to say that with his intellectual concept of the ideal relations between men and women, he shouldn’t have felt like that.  Shouldn’t have felt!  The phrase was self-contradictory.  Feelings weren’t decorative abstractions which you selected according to your best moral and esthetic judgment out of an unlimited stock, and ordered wrapped and sent home.  They were things that happened to you.  In this case, two violently opposed feelings of terrible intensity had happened to him at once; had torn each other, and, in their struggle, had torn him.  Justified or not, it was her act in leaving him, that had turned those feelings loose upon him.  It was through her that he had suffered; that was plain enough.  It must have been terribly plain to him.

And yet, despite the suffering she had caused him, he had crucified his pride again and come to find her; not with reproaches, with utter contrition and humility.  The measures he’d suggested for easing their strained situation were, to be sure, maddeningly beside the mark.  The fact that he’d offered them betrayed his complete failure to understand the situation.  But it had cost him, evidently, as much pain to work them out and bring them to her, as if they had been the real solvents he took them for.  And she had contemptuously torn them to shreds, and sent him away feeling like an unpardoned criminal.  She hadn’t drawn the sting from one of the barbs she’d planted in him, in her anger, before he’d left her in that North Clark Street room.

She didn’t blame herself for the anger, nor for the panic of revulsion that had excited it.  That was a feeling that had happened to her.  What she did blame herself for was that, seeing them both now, as the victims of a regrettable accident (did she really regret it?  Were it in her power to obliterate the memory of it altogether, as a child with a wet sponge can obliterate a misspelled word from a slate, would she do it?  She dismissed that question unanswered.), she had allowed him to go away with his burden of guilt unlightened.  She had done that, she told herself, out of sheer cowardice.  She had been afraid of impairing the luster of her virtuously superior position.