He was beginning to shake off the state of apathy which had overcome him as soon as the strain was over; but even now he could not have said how the days had passed since Laura Lou's death. All he was certain of was that, after all, no great inner change had befallen him. He remembered how once before, after he had carried her off to New York, reconquering her from her mother and Bunty Hayes, he had expected that everything in their lives would be new and different and how he had gradually come to see that nothing was changed. And it was the same now: life could not change Laura Lou, and neither had death changed her. At first he had imagined that death, the great renewer, would renew his blurred vision of her, set her before him in a completeness he had somehow always missed. But death did nothing of the kind. It left him only that larval image among the white roses, with which his imagination could do nothing. Behind that uncommunicative mask the face of the real Laura Lou was as he had always known it. How could death give people anything they had not had in life, except the pathos of the thwarted destiny? And that he had always felt in Laura Lou. He had always thought of her as someone thwarted and unfulfilled; had often imagined her life with another man—with Bunty Hayes even—as more likely to have given her the chance to express what was in her. But fate had made her choose him instead; and in spite of the incompleteness of their life together he knew, to the very last, that it was what she wanted. It had not needed death to show him that. It was because he knew that he was her choice, and that she would certainly have chosen rather to be unhappy with him than comfortable and contented with anyone else, that the tie between them was sacred. Death had altered nothing in his vision of her, and added nothing to it. Death had simply closed the book in which he had long ago read the last word… .

When these thoughts first came they frightened him. It seemed as though he could never have loved Laura Lou; yet this was not so. And she had never been so dear to him as during their last months together. But since he had honestly tried to give her all that she was capable of receiving from him, how was he to blame if her going had left the live forces in him untouched? It was as if a door had quietly opened and shut in a room in which he was working—and when he looked up from his work he saw no change. Someone had gone out, but the room was not more empty… .