Helen was working silently, absorbed in thought, and going on with her
modelling mechanically. She was pondering the old question, whether she
had done well in coming back to America, or whether she should have
still kept the ocean between herself and Grant Herman. While she was in
Europe, the longing to see him, to feel that he was near, to breathe
the same air, had become ever more strenuous, until at last it could
not be resisted. The sense of safety she had while so far away
prevented her from appreciating that she was returning to the same
danger from which she had fled. She told herself that time had so
softened and changed her feelings, that Herman with wife and son was so
different from the lonely man who had sought her love, and whom she had
bravely renounced from a stern sense of duty, whether wise or not, that
there could be no danger. She was a woman, and she had kept temptation
at a distance until the nerve of resistance was worn out; then she had
come home.
Now she asked herself what she had gained. She had renounced the
passive acquiescence which she had won by years of hard struggle, and
she had in exchange only a fierce unrest which was well-nigh
unendurable. To be near Herman and yet to be as far removed from him as
if the universe were between was a torture such as she had not dreamed
of. All the old love awoke, and something of the old conviction which
had made renunciation possible had failed her with time.
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