He's cast her off so she comes to me. He did not think so, but he wanted to indulge himself in this belief. He had hitherto controlled a loathing for Dudley which was unreasoning. Now he resented Dudley for Julia's sake and could despise her through this very resentment. Julia's isolation was pathetic, yet Laurence had only to recall the physical nature of his emotion when they were together to know that he could not express his pity for her. He tried to force all intimate sense of her out of his mind. When he actually considered himself rid of her he was conscious of being bright and blank like a mirror from which the reflections are withdrawn, and there was a crazy stirring of laughter through the emptiness in him. He passed along the neat sidewalks, his head bowed. His air of abstraction was ostentatious. He wanted to enjoy uninterruptedly the relaxation of self-loathing. There were deep, violet-red shadows on the newly-washed asphalt street. The treetops were still and glistening against the line of faintly gilded roofs. The grass blades on the ordered lawns were green glass along which the quiet light trickled. Well-dressed children played under the eyes of nurse maids. A limousine was drawn up in the shrubbery that surrounded a Georgian portico. Laurence decided that he was relieved by the failure which separated him from the pretensions of success. He recalled the unhappiness of his first marriage, and the depression he had experienced with his baby's death. It pleased him that he seemed doomed to fail in every relationship. Alice and I are strangely alike after all. He took a grandiose satisfaction in the delayed admittance that he and Alice were alike. Wondering if Julia would ultimately leave him, he told himself that he was the one who ought to go away to save Bobby from the contamination of such bitterness. Of May he somehow did not wish to think. * * * * * When Dudley communicated with Julia over the telephone her manner was strained and resentful, and when he wrote her notes she replied to him with a reserve that showed her antagonism. His curiosity concerning her and Laurence was becoming painful. He guessed that she was in spiritual turmoil and he could not bear to be excluded from the consequences of a situation which he himself had brought about. If he could imagine himself dictating the course of her life, and of her husband's, it would not be so hard to forego that physical pleasure in her which had made him resentful of her, as of all other women. At the same time he fought off relinquishing any of himself to her necessities. She needed to grow. She did not belong in her bourgeois environment but she must escape it alone. He told himself that later she would thank him that he had been strong for both of them.