He just wanted to let things drift--to wander about the fields and
roads, to find his clothes growing shabby upon him, to grow old without
knowing even that he was alive--all this had come to him.
She, on the other side, would drive him back into the battle of it all once
more. To go back a failure--to be pointed out as the man whose wife left
him because she found him so dull--to hear men like young Percival Galleon
laughing at his book--to sell his soul for journalism in order to make a
living--to see, perhaps, Clare come back into the London world--to break
out, ultimately, when he was sick and tired of it all, into every kind of
debauch ... how much better to slip into nothing down here where nobody
knew nor cared!
And yet, on the other hand, he had never known until now the importance
that Norah Monogue had held in his life.
Always, in everything he had done, in his ambitions and despairs, his
triumphs and defeats, she had been behind him. He'd just do anything in the
world for her!--anything except this one thing. Up and down, up and down
he paced the little Minstrels' room, with its dusty green chair and its
shining floor--"I just can't stand it all over again!"
But every time that he went in to see her--and he was with her
continually--made his resistance harder. She didn't speak about it again
but he knew that she was always thinking about it.
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