Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/312

Rh The material facilities of the life about him, the way in which the machinery of the great empty house ran on like some complex apparatus working in the void, increased the exasperation of his nerves. Dr. Wyant’s suggestion—which Amherst suspected Justine of having prompted—that Mrs. Amherst should cancel her autumn engagements, and give herself up to a quiet outdoor life with her husband, seemed to present the very opportunity these two distracted spirits needed to ﬁnd and repossess each other. But, though Amherst was grateful to Bessy for having dismissed her visitors—partly to please him, as he guessed—yet he found the routine of the establishment more oppressive than when the house was full. If he could have been alone with her in a quiet corner—the despised cottage at Westmore, even!—he fancied they might still have been brought together by restricted space and the familiar exigencies of life. All the primitive necessities which bind together, through their recurring daily wants, natures fated to ﬁnd no higher point of union, had been carefully eliminated from the life at Lynbrook, where material needs were not only provided for but anticipated by a hidden mechanism that ﬁlled the house with the perpetual sense of invisible attendance. Though Amherst knew that he and Bessy could never meet in the region of great issues, he thought he might have regained the way to her heart, and found relief from [ 296 ]