There comes a moment in the life of almost every one when, bewildered, for the first time they meet an everyday and faulty person in place of the beloved. Sometimes this is the beginning of a long disillusion; it is then that many find out that one has not been in love at all, but only in love with being in love. With young lovers one often calls this first glimpse the first quarrel. After marriage this slow torment of becoming accustomed to another personality in the body of the beloved is called the “time of adjustment.”

With Ellen this moment was a severe spiritual crisis. As she had seen concentrated in the last weeks only the lovable things in Roger, so in this one moment she had a vision of all in him that was inimical to happiness and peace. It was as if that blind, voiceless judge that sits deep within all of us and bids us love, hate, or fear, had been aroused to its depth, and its final judgment of Roger had been that here was danger. Had there been any place to run to, she would have fled, but there was nothing to do but sit still. She dreamed at night that she saw his face savage in anger, heartless in its desire, and relentless in its will to get what it wanted from life; and since she could not leave home to run away from him, she ran from him spiritually.

When he came to see her next, he could hardly find Ellen in the inert and docile person who presented herself to his gaze. It was as though the glance he had given his mother and the tone in which he had spoken had been to her a prophecy of life to come. She saw him with that terrible clairvoyance that love gives; she saw clearly what her life in the hands of this other Roger would mean; and it seemed as if the very inner spirit of her struggled to free herself from his power.

I, personally, fear the shocks of the spirit as some fear physical pain, and instinctively I withdrew from the perversities of men, and I now look shudderingly back on two marriages which I might have made but for this warning bell which rang over the reefs of the spirit. Her first movement had been one of flaming indignation; that burned out, leaving behind it the ashes of a dull, apathetic fear. When he asked her what was the matter and why, she told him she was afraid of him. He called himself a brute, he apologized to his mother, but she remained inert and docile, as aloof as a person who has been stunned by the spectacle of a great disaster, and, indeed, the flood of her emotions had ebbed back violently.

In despair Roger came to me.

“I’ve lost Ellen,” he told me. “We’ve awfully bad tempers in our family, and my mother didn’t understand that since I’ve known Ellen there are a whole lot of things in my life that I want to forget. The me Ellen knows is a different me from the one mother knows.”

He had never been as sweet to Ellen as he was now. She had seen before a brave lover who rushed everything before him and when he was refused anything would turn into a naughty little boy. Now he was a tender suppliant asking for mercy, confessing his sins and inventing sweet and touching things to do for Ellen. I think the men of my day were crueler as men and warmer as lovers. A man like Roger possessed himself more of a woman’s mind and life than the men of to-day that I see around me seem able to do with their sweethearts. There was no little corner of her spirit that he did not wish to occupy, and to gain admission to her frightened little heart he made himself small and humble and appealing. Of the sincerity of his wretchedness and his repentance there was no doubt.

“If she were only angry with me,” he said to me, “but she’s afraid, Roberta. It’s a terrible thing to see her shrink from me. She doesn’t mean to be unkind. She told me in all seriousness, as if she meant it, that she thought it would be better for all of us if I left her now. Why, she’s my life, Roberta!”

I was profoundly touched, as who would not have been? Nor did I fail to repeat this to Ellen. I had told Alec what the matter was, for seeing Ellen listless and remote he had jumped to the conclusion that Roger had hurt her in some way, and in Roger’s defense I told him the truth and he put himself stolidly on the side of Ellen’s instinct. Through one long day she and Alec went off together as they had when they were children, while Roger raged up and down. Ellen wrote:—

Already, though she didn’t know it, she was coming back to Roger. Every day he went to see her with some carefully thought-out little gift. Every night he wrote her a letter which he sent by me, and she wrote in answer a letter that she didn’t send.

There is nothing truer in the life of the affections than this, that the wound made by those whom we love can only be cured by them. One may be sick even to death, and yet the only cure can come from the one who has poisoned life for us. There is only one other way to cure the hurt, and that is to stop loving. That’s why a great many things become easier to bear as the years go by. We find men and women philosophically facing situations which formerly would have stopped all life for them. These are the dead of heart who have forgotten to care when they do this, and where one woman gains peace from a higher understanding of the man she loves, a dozen others find it by ceasing to love at all.

Ellen made her attempt at escape, and then came back because she couldn’t help it. The one person in the world who could have helped her was Alec. She was sincere when she told me:—

“If Alec was my brother, and had a home for me somewhere where I need not see Roger again, I’d go to him.”

It was her very docility and lack of resistance that maddened Roger. He told me:—

“Somehow Ellen has slipped out of my hands into a magic circle; she’s afraid of me. It’s as though she lived inside a crystal shell—I can see her and speak to her, but I can’t touch her.”

I, myself, was very much disturbed and moved by it all. There was Ellen who had burned in a fire of happiness, whose very look at Roger had been a caress, who seemed to give herself to him by the way she stood,—her arms relaxed as though all her body cried out to him to take her,—now lost in apathy; nothing that I told her affected her as far as I could see. After days of this, just as I was giving up hope, I met them one afternoon, swinging down the street toward me, with the air of a god and goddess recently let out of prison. Roger had Prudentia flung on his shoulder, and carried the child aloft as though she were a flag of triumph. All the explanation I ever had of the reconciliation was what I had then and there.

“He came down the street,” Ellen told me, “with Prudentia on his shoulder, and said, ‘Hello, Ellen,’ and I said, ‘Hello, Roger,’ and he put out his hand to me and I took it. Why, Roberta, aren’t you glad?” asked Ellen.

“She wanted more pomp and circumstance,” Roger jeered at me. “She wanted you, Ellen, to rush to my arms and say, ‘Roderigo, I forgive thee.’”

They went on; I heard their laughter down the street. That was all the thanks they gave me.