With all of which, immediately after her question, her "Why did he, why did he ?" rushed back, inevitably, the confounding, the overwhelming wave of the knowledge of his reason.

"He did it for ME, he did it for me," she moaned, "he did it, exactly, that our freedom--meaning, beloved man, simply and solely mine--should be greater instead of less; he did it, divinely, to liberate me so far as possible from caring what became of him." She found time upstairs, even in her haste, as she had repeatedly found time before, to let the wonderments involved in these recognitions flash at her with their customary effect of making her blink: the question in especial of whether she might find her solution in acting, herself, in the spirit of what he had done, in forcing her "care" really to grow as much less as he had tried to make it.

Thus she felt the whole weight of their case drop afresh upon her shoulders, was confronted, unmistakably, with the prime source of her haunted state.

It all came from her not having been able not to mind--not to mind what became of him; not having been able, without anxiety, to let him go his way and take his risk and lead his life.

She had made anxiety her stupid little idol; and absolutely now, while she stuck a long pin, a trifle fallaciously, into her hat--she had, with an approach to irritation, told her maid, a new woman, whom she had lately found herself thinking of as abysmal, that she didn't want her--she tried to focus the possibility of some understanding between them in consequence of which he should cut loose.
Very near indeed it looked, any such possibility! that consciousness, too, had taken its turn by the time she was ready; all the vibration, all the emotion of this present passage being, precisely, in the very sweetness of their lapse back into the conditions of the simpler time, into a queer resemblance between the aspect and the feeling of the moment and those of numberless other moments that were sufficiently far away.