It was Matthew I wanted,Matthew of whom I thought,and trivial,long-forgotten incidents of the past kept recurring to me constantly.I still received his weekly letters;but he did not ask why,since I had taken a vacation,I had not come over to them.He represented the medium,the link between Maude and me that no estrangement,no separation could break.
All this new vision of mine was for him,for the coming generation,the soil in which it must be sown,the Americans of the future.And who so well as Matthew,sensitive yet brave,would respond to it?I wished not only to give him what I had begun to grasp,to study with him,to be his companion and friend,but to spare him,if possible,some of my own mistakes and sufferings and punishments.But could I go back?Happy coincidences of desires and convictions had been so characteristic of that other self I had been struggling to cast off:I had so easily been persuaded,when I had had a chance of getting Nancy,that it was the right thing to do!And now,in my loneliness,was I not growing just as eager to be convinced that it was my duty to go back to the family which in the hour of self-sufficiency I had cast off?I had believed in divorce then--why not now?Well,I still believed in it.I had thought of a union with Nancy as something that would bring about the "self-realization that springs from the gratification of a great passion,"--an appealing phrase I had read somewhere.But,it was at least a favourable symptom that I was willing now to confess that the "self-realization"had been a secondary and sentimental consideration,a rosy,self-created halo to give a moral and religious sanction to my desire.Was I not trying to do that very thing now?It tortured me to think so;I strove to achieve a detached consideration of the problem,--to arrive at length at a thought that seemed illuminating:that the it wrongness"or "rightness,"utility and happiness of all such unions depend upon whether or not they become a part of the woof and warp of the social fabric;in other words,whether the gratification of any particular love by divorce and remarriage does or does not tend to destroy a portion of that fabric.