Then suddenly he cried out harshly: "I ought never to have married her--never, never! I had my task. I gave myself to her. Oh! the high immensities, the great and terrible things open to the mind of man! And we breed children and live in littered houses and play with our food and chatter, chatter, chatter. Oh, the chatter of my life! The folly! The women with their clothes. I can hear them rustle now, whiff the scent of it! The scandals--as though the things they did with themselves and each other mattered a rap; the little sham impromptu clever things, the trying to keep young--and underneath it all that continual cheating, cheating, cheating, damning struggle for money!... "Marjorie, Marjorie, Marjorie! Why is she so good and no better! Why wasn't she worth it altogether?... "No! I don't want to go on with it any more--ever. I want to go back. "I want my life over again, and to go back. "I want research, and the spirit of research that has died in me, and that still, silent room of mine again, that room, as quiet as a cell, and the toil that led to light. Oh! the coming of that light, the uprush of discovery, the solemn joy as the generalization rises like a sun upon the facts--floods them with a common meaning. That is what I want. That is what I have always wanted.... "Give me my time oh God! again; I am sick of this life I have chosen. I am sick of it! This--busy death! Give me my time again.... Why did you make me, and then waste me like this? Why are we made for folly upon folly? Folly! and brains made to scale high heaven, smeared into the dust! Into the dust, into the dust. Dust!..." He passed into weak, wandering repetitions of disconnected sentences, that died into whispers and silence, and Marjorie watched him and listened to him, and waited with a noiseless dexterity upon his every need. § 11 One day, she did not know what day, for she had lost count of the days, Marjorie set the kettle to boil and opened the door of the hut to look out, and the snow was ablaze with diamonds, and the air was sweet and still. It occurred to her that it would be well to take Trafford out into that brief brightness. She looked at him and found his eyes upon the sunlight quiet and rather wondering eyes. "Would you like to get out into that?" she asked abruptly. "Yes," he said, and seemed disposed to get up. "You've got a broken leg," she cried, to arrest his movement, and he looked at her and answered: "Of course--I forgot." She was all atremble that he should recognize her and speak to her. She pulled her rude old sledge alongside his bunk, and kissed him, and showed him how to shift and drop himself upon the plank. She took him in her arms and lowered him. He helped weakly but understandingly, and she wrapped him up warmly on the planks and lugged him out and built up a big fire at his feet, wondering, but as yet too fearful to rejoice, at the change that had come to him.