springs from the gratification of a great passion,”—­an appealing phrase I had read somewhere.  But, it was at least a favourable symptom that I was willing now to confess that the “self-realization” had been a secondary and sentimental consideration, a rosy, self-created halo to give a moral and religious sanction to my desire.  Was I not trying to do that very thing now?  It tortured me to think so; I strove to achieve a detached consideration of the problem,—­to arrive at length at a thought that seemed illuminating:  that the it “wrongness” or “rightness,” utility and happiness of all such unions depend upon whether or not they become a part of the woof and warp of the social fabric; in other words, whether the gratification of any particular love by divorce and remarriage does or does not tend to destroy a portion of that fabric.  Nancy certainly would have been justified in divorce.  It did not seem in the retrospect that I would have been:  surely not if, after I had married Nancy, I had developed this view of life that seemed to me to be the true view.  I should have been powerless to act upon it.  But the chances were I should not have developed it, since it would seem that any salvation for me at least must come precisely through suffering, through not getting what I wanted.  Was this equivocating?

My mistake had been in marrying Maude instead of Nancy—­a mistake largely due to my saturation with a false idea of life.  Would not the attempt to cut loose from the consequences of that mistake in my individual case have been futile?  But there was a remedy for it—­the remedy Krebs had suggested:  I might still prevent my children from making such a mistake, I might help to create in them what I might have been, and thus find a solution for myself.  My errors would then assume a value.

But the question tortured me:  would Maude wish it?  Would it be fair to her if she did not?  By my long neglect I had forfeited the right to go.  And would she agree with my point of view if she did permit me to stay?  I had less concern on this score, a feeling that that development of hers, which once had irritated me, was in the same direction as my own....

I have still strangely to record moments when, in spite of the aspirations I had achieved, of the redeeming vision I had gained, at the thought of returning to her I revolted.  At such times recollections came into my mind of those characteristics in her that had seemed most responsible for my alienation....  That demon I had fed so mightily still lived.  By what right—­he seemed to ask—­had I nourished him all these years if now I meant to starve him?  Thus sometimes he defied me, took on Protean guises, blustered, insinuated, cajoled, managed to make me believe that to starve him would be to starve myself, to sap all there was of power in me.  Let me try and see if I could do it!  Again he whispered, to what purpose had I gained my liberty, if now I renounced it?  I could not live in fetters, even though the fetters should be self-imposed.  I was lonely now, but I would get over that, and life lay before me still.