You must not think from this that there was no emotion. There was tremendous emotion, only it was not the emotion of love after long separation. If it was that there were too many elements in it to allow pent-up passion the immediate right of way. Pent-up passion was stemmed by the realization of what my coming back must mean to the woman before me. For her I had been three years in my grave. As Alice Mountney had put it, she had been in mourning for me—and out again. It was the out again that created this thickened atmosphere between her and me. What had been all over, finished and done with she had to begin again. And I had not come back to her as I had gone away. I had come back—entirely to the outward eye and somewhat in my heart—not as the smart young fellow of Lydia Blair’s recollection, but as a working-man. The metamorphosis rendered me in some ways more akin to Boosey the butler than to my former self. I had acquired an art that made it possible for me to go into the servants’ sitting-room and be at home in the company I should find there. The people in the front of the house had to some extent become to me as the Olympian gods at Creed & Creed’s, exalted beings with whom I had little to do outside the necessities of work and pay. This change in me was more than superficial; and whatever it was Vio saw it. For her the meeting was harder than for me; and for me it was like a backward revolution of the years. But after she had clung to me and cried a little, the tensity was broken. As I analyze now, I see the impulse that urged us into each other’s arms as one of memory. For her, I was the man who had been, as she was the woman who had been, for me. She, however, had the help of pity, while I was humble and overawed. It was one of those moments when so many things begin again that it is hard to seize on any. The simplest being the easiest, she said, after having detached herself from me and got back some measure of her self-control: "What about your things? Have you brought them?" "The little I have is at the hotel." Both question and answer came out absently while we looked at each other with a new kind of inspection. The first had been of the self within; now it was of the outer self. I should have shrunk from the way in which her eyes traveled over me had not my whole mind gone into the examination I was making.