Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/344

Rh folly into which mistaken judgment or perverted enthusiasm might have hurried her; but to go on battling against the dull unimaginative subservience to personal luxury—the slavery to houses and servants and clothes—ah, no, while he had any ﬁght left in him it was worth spending in a better cause than that!

Through the open window he could hear, in the mild December stillness, his horse’s feet coming and going on the gravel. Her horse, led up and down by her servant, at the door of her house!… The sound symbolized his whole future … the situation his marriage had made for him, and to which he must henceforth bend, unless he broke with it then and there.… He tried to look ahead, to follow up, one by one, the consequences of such a break. That it would be ﬁnal he had no doubt. There are natures which seem to be drawn closer by dissension, to depend, for the renewal of understanding, on the spark of generosity and compunction that anger strikes out of both; but Amherst knew that between himself and his wife no such clearing of the moral atmosphere was possible. The indignation which left him with tingling nerves and a burning need of some immediate escape into action, crystallized in Bessy into a hard kernel of obstinacy, into which, after each fresh collision, he felt that a little more of herself had been absorbed.… No, the break between them would be ﬁnal—if he went now [ 328 ]