Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/313

Rh his own inaction, in the small ministrations of daily life; but the next moment he smiled to picture Bessy in surroundings where the clocks were not wound of themselves and the doors did not ﬂy open at her approach. Those thick-crowding cares and drudgeries which serve as, merciful screens between so many discordant natures would have been as intolerable to her as was to Amherst the great glare of leisure in which he and she were now confronted.

He saw that Bessy was in the state of propitiatory eagerness which always followed on her gaining a point in their long duel; and he could guess that she was tremulously anxious not only to make up to him, by all the arts she knew, for the sacriﬁce she had exacted, but also to conceal from every one the fact that, as Mr. Langhope bluntly put it, he had been “brought to terms.” Amherst was touched by her efforts, and half-ashamed of his own inability to respond to them. But his mind, released from its normal preoccupations, had become a dangerous instrument of analysis and disintegration, and conditions which, a few months before, he might have accepted with the wholesome tolerance of the busy man, now pressed on him unendurably. He saw that he and his wife were really face to face for the ﬁrst time since their marriage. Hitherto something had always intervened between them—ﬁrst the spell of her grace and beauty, and the [ 297 ]