Laurence knew now that his attitude regarding Bobby was apparent to Julia, and that it caused her pain. Why he punished her by keeping her apart from his son and making her ill at ease when the child was present he could not have said. However, though he realized absurdities in himself, he would not renounce his sense of righteousness. What he suffered through compunction was to him the pain of virtue. He hurt Julia in order to convince himself of her depth of feeling. While he observed her misery, he could believe that she would not betray him again. Her agony was his, but it showed him that she was not callous and indifferent to the consequences of her acts. He could not yet allow himself to express any love for her. He would not even admit his desire to do so. In the meantime, without understanding his expectation, he waited and withheld himself. When she looked at him there was always in her eyes the demand of self-pity. When she would accept, as he did, the recognition that there was nothing, that there could be nothing, he would not be afraid to give himself. He struggled with his tenderness for her. It was always tearing at him. He was never at rest. Because he put the thought of her out of his mind, he seemed to have no thoughts at all--only an emptiness consuming him. He tried to comfort himself with generalities and reverted to the illusory finality of the positivist philosophy which he had at one time professed. Julia decided that self-loathing was the inevitable outgrowth of profound experience. Others, who were as fully self-aware as she, were filled with the same nausea of futility. She had several times talked to Charles Hurst on the telephone, and the sound of his voice always exhilarated her. When she sensed his emotion in speaking with her, a kind of iron seemed to enter into her despair. Her distaste for contact with him only convinced her of the pride of her recklessness. The more intimate their relationship became, the more voluptuously she scourged herself by her accurate perceptions of his deficiencies. Only by seeing him at his worst could she preserve her gratification in being tender to him and careless of her own interest. * * * * *