an integral part of it.  What would his housekeeper say?  But now that he had actually removed it from the wall he could not replace it, so he opened the closet door and thrust it into a corner among relics which had found refuge there.  He had put his past in the closet; yet the relief he felt was mingled with the peculiar qualm that follows the discovery of symptoms never before remarked.  Why should this woman have this extraordinary effect of making him dissatisfied with himself?  He sat down again and tried to review the affair from that first day when he had surprised in her eyes the flame dwelling in her.  She had completely upset his life, increasingly distracted his mind until now he could imagine no peace unless he possessed her.  Hitherto he had recognized in his feeling for her nothing but that same desire he had had for other women, intensified to a degree never before experienced.  But this sudden access of morality—­he did not actually define it as such—­was disquieting.  And in the feverish, semi-objective survey he was now making of his emotional tract he was discovering the presence of other disturbing symptoms such as an unwonted tenderness, a consideration almost amounting to pity which at times he had vaguely sensed yet never sought imaginatively to grasp.  It bewildered him by hampering a ruthlessness hitherto absolute.  The fierceness of her inflamed his passion, yet he recognized dimly behind this fierceness an instinct of self-protection—­and he thought of her in this moment as a struggling bird that fluttered out of his hands when they were ready to close over her.  So it had been to-night.  He might have kept her, prevented her from taking the car.  Yet he had let her go!  There came again, utterly to blot this out, the memory of her lips.

Even then, there had been something sorrowful in that kiss, a quality he resented as troubling, a flavour that came to him after the wildness was spent.  What was she struggling against?  What was behind her resistance?  She loved him!  It had never before occurred to him to enter into the nature of her feelings, having been so preoccupied with and tortured by his own.  This realization, that she loved him, as it persisted, began to make him uneasy, though it should, according to all experience, have been a reason for sheer exultation.  He began to see that with her it involved complications, responsibilities, disclosures, perhaps all of those things he had formerly avoided and resented in woman.  He thought of certain friends of his who had become tangled up—­of one in particular whose bank account had been powerless to extricate him....  And he was ashamed of himself.