reunion. But she showed no resentment and no jealousy. Extraordinarily,
she did not compete against Marion. Never once in all our time together
did she say an adverse word of Marion....

She set herself presently to dispel the shadow that brooded over me with
the same instinctive skill that some women will show with the trouble
of a child. She made herself my glad and pretty slave and handmaid; she
forced me at last to rejoice in her. Yet at the back of it all Marion
remained, stupid and tearful and infinitely distressful, so that I was
almost intolerably unhappy for her--for her and the dead body of my
married love.

It is all, as I tell it now, unaccountable to me. I go back into these
remote parts, these rarely visited uplands and lonely tares of memory,
and it seems to me still a strange country. I had thought I might be
going to some sensuous paradise with Effie, but desire which fills the
universe before its satisfaction, vanishes utterly like the going of
daylight--with achievement. All the facts and forms of life remain
darkling and cold. It was an upland of melancholy questionings, a region
from which I saw all the world at new angles and in new aspects; I had
outflanked passion and romance.

I had come into a condition of vast perplexities. For the first time in
my life, at least so it seems to me now in this retrospect, I looked at
my existence as a whole.

Since this was nothing, what was I doing? What was I for?

I was going to and fro about Tono-Bungay--the business I had taken up
to secure Marion and which held me now in spite of our intimate