He turned wearily from its staleness, and told himself, after long pondering of the problem, that he had been mistaken, that he had been foolishly, and a little arrogantly, seeking in life the imaginative force, the mastery of ideas and human thoughts and feelings that he had found in literature. Life, maybe, proceeds through eruption and epidemic; art through human understanding and sympathy and will. . . . That pleased him as a definite result, but at once he was offended by the separation, yet, amid so much confusion, it was difficult to resist the appeal of so clean and sharp a conception. It lost the clarity of its outline when he set it against his earlier idea of living brimming over into life. . . . There were then three things, living, life and art, a Trinity, three lakes fed by the same river. That was large and poetic, but surely inaccurate. For, in that order, the lakes must be fed by a strange river that flowed upward. . . . Anyhow, it was something to have established the three things which could comprise everything that had penetrated his own consciousness, three things which were of the same essence, expressions of the same force. Within the action and interaction there seemed to be room for everything, even for Sir Henry Butcher, even for Tyler Harbottle, M.P. He had arrived at the sort of indolent charity which, in the machine, passes for wisdom and sanity, the unimaginative tolerance which furs and clogs all the workings of a man's mind and heart. It is not far removed from indifference. . . . In his weariness, the exhaustion and satiety of the modern world, he measured his wisdom by the folly of others, and in his satisfaction at the discrepancy found conceit and thought it confidence. He began to write again and returned to his projected essay on Woman, believing that he had in his idea disentangled the species from Matilda. He was convinced that he had risen above his love for her, to the immense profit of their relationship, which had become more solid, settled and pleasurable. As he had planned when they came to London, so it had happened. They had gone their ways, seemed for a time to lose sight of each other, met again, and were now--were they not?--journeying on apace along life's highway, hailing the travelers by the road, aiding the weary, cracking a joke and a yarn with those of good cheer, staying in pleasant inns. "Something like a marriage!" thought he. "Life's fullest adventure." And he measured his marriage against those of the men and women in the machine; sour captivity for the most part, or a shallow, prattling and ostentatious devotion. His essay on Woman was only a self-satisfied description of his marriage. Out of the writing of it came no profit except to his vanity. Preoccupied with questions of style, he pruned and pared it down, refashioned and remodeled it until at last he could not read it himself. Having no convenient sands in which to bury it, he gave it to Panoukian to read.