But he used her just as he used every and any one else whom he found
capable of contributing to his advancement; and, as she never insisted upon
herself, never sought to influence or even to inquire into his course of
action, she did not find him out.
She was in a vague way an unhappy woman. A discontent, a feeling that her
life was incomplete, perpetually teased her. He was distinctly unhappy,
often gloomy, at times morose. In her rare analytic moods she attributed
their failure to prolong the happiness of their courtship to the hard work
which kept him from her, kept them from enjoying the great love which she
assumed they felt each for the other. She would not and could not see that
that love had long disappeared, leaving a mask of forms, of phrases and of
impulses of passion to conceal its departure. And to this view he outwardly
assented, when she suggested it; but he knew that she was deceiving herself
as to him, and wondered if she were not deceiving herself as to her own
feelings.
Up to the time of the "Coal Conspiracy" and his attempt to put himself
straight with her, the idea of his love for her and of her oneness with him
had at least a hold upon his imagination. He then saw how far apart they
had drifted; and he dismissed from his mind even the pretense that love
played any part in his life.
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