That was a cross hard to bear.  Yet even that she bore.  And schooled herself into a fretful, petulant manner of indifference.  Her odd, whimsical petulance hid a will which he, and he alone, knew to be stronger than steel, strong as a diabolical, cold, grey snake that presses and presses and cannot-relax:  nay, cannot relax.  She became the same as he.  Even in her moments of most passionate desire for him, the cold and snake-like tension of her will never relaxed, and the cold, snake-like eye of her intention never closed.

So, till it reached a deadlock.  Each will was wound tense, and so fixed.  Fixed!  There was neither any relaxing or any increase of pressure.  Fixed.  Hard like a numbness, a grip that was solidifying and turning to stone.

He realised, somehow, that at this terrible passive game of fixed tension she would beat him.  Her fixed female soul, her wound-up female will would solidify into stone—­whereas his must break.  In him something must break.  It was a cold and fatal deadlock, profitless.  A life-automatism of fixed tension that suddenly, in him, did break.  His will flew loose in a recoil:  a recoil away from her.  He left her, as inevitably as a broken spring flies out from its hold.

Not that he was broken.  He would not do her even that credit.  He had only flown loose from the old centre-fixture.  His will was still entire and unabated.  Only he did not know:  he did not understand.  He swung wildly about from place to place, as if he were broken.

Then suddenly, on this Sunday evening in the strange country, he realised something about himself.  He realised that he had never intended to yield himself fully to her or to anything:  that he did not intend ever to yield himself up entirely to her or to anything:  that his very being pivoted on the fact of his isolate self-responsibility, aloneness.  His intrinsic and central aloneness was the very centre of his being.  Break it, and he broke his being.  Break this central aloneness, and he broke everything.  It was the great temptation, to yield himself:  and it was the final sacrilege.  Anyhow, it was something which, from his profoundest soul, he did not intend to do.  By the innermost isolation and singleness of his own soul he would abide though the skies fell on top of one another, and seven heavens collapsed.

Vaguely he realised this.  And vaguely he realised that this had been the root cause of his strife with Lottie:  Lottie, the only person who had mattered at all to him in all the world:  save perhaps his mother.  And his mother had not mattered, no, not one-half nor one-fifth what Lottie had mattered.  So it was:  there was, for him, only her significant in the universe.  And between him and her matters were as they were.

He coldly and terribly hated her, for a moment.  Then no more.  There was no solution.  It was a situation without a solution.  But at any rate, it was now a defined situation.  He could rest in peace.