To avoid recognizing the platitudinous details of his love affairs he submitted himself to mystical tortures. He wanted to leave each incident of his existence finished and perfect as he passed through it. As much as he craved admiration, he needed gentleness, but he could not ask for it. He remained on the beach until nightfall. He could not discover in himself enough grief to release him from the cold misery and absurdity of everyday human affairs. * * * * * Between Julia and Laurence, the reflex of their emotional fatigue expressed itself in a mutual inertia. Except that Laurence showed his desire to be alone by moving his bed into a small isolated room at the back of the house, nothing in the order of existence was changed. Before the children, Julia spoke to him gently, almost pathetically, and only now and then dared look at his face. He tried to avoid her guilty and demanding gaze. If she caught his eyes he would glance quickly and defensively away with a contraction of his features that he could not control. School was over. "You and the children might go for a month on the beach," Laurence said. And Julia said, "Yes." But she did not make any definite plans. She was waiting for something which she had never named to herself. When she was away from him in her room she went over and over the succession of events, and wondered if she should leave the house to go out and earn her living, since she had betrayed Laurence's confidence and no longer deserved anything at his hands. She sustained the ideas of conscience to the point of applying for employment with the City Board of Health, and, some weeks after, a position was given her. But it seemed an irrelevant incident which resolved nothing. If Laurence had imposed difficulties on her she would have justified herself in facing them. What seemed most horrible now was that everything was in suspense, and she was cheated of the emotional cleansing which relieved her in a crisis even where there were ominous consequences to follow. Laurence made a constant effort to escape the atmosphere of anticipation which her manner created. When he was not with her he fancied he saw everything clearly. She had always been searching for something apart from him and she had found it. He decided that it was the clearness and finality of his vision of her and of himself that left him unable to create a future. Laurence thought, in language different from Julia's, that a man comes to the end of his life when he knows himself entirely. Emotion can only build on the vagueness of expectation. His complete awareness of the causes of his state allowed him no resentments. He imagined that he could no longer feel anything toward Julia. He was conscious of the broken thing in himself. He could not feel himself going on. There was nothing but annihilating space around him. He reflected that Julia could intoxicate herself with death, and that he had no such autoerotic sense.