The Wheel of Life by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
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Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow >> The Wheel of Life
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"One always meets again, you know," she answered, "but if you're waiting
for Gerty now, she is usually after time."
"Women always are," he commented gayly, with his foreign shrug.
The window was just behind him, and as he glanced out into the street,
she looked at him in the puzzled wonder with which one seeks in
unchanged features; a discernible justification of a passion which is
altered. Where was the power to-day against which her heart had beat so
helplessly a year ago? Was it possible that she had felt the charm in
this man who was already middle-aged, who was satisfied with the mere
concrete form of life, and in whose eyes she could see now the heaviness
which grows through self-indulgence? His old intimate smile, his
disturbing ironic glance, even the quickening of his first passive
interest into the emotional curiosity which was the strongest impulse
his world-weariness had left alive--each and all of these effects which
she remembered impressed her as little to-day as did the bulky
fascination of Perry Bridewell. When at last she could escape in the
flutter of Gerty's entrance, she left the room and the house with a
tremor of her pulses which was strangely associated with a delicious
sense of peace--for this chance meeting had revealed to her not only
Kemper but herself.
As she walked slowly toward the golden circle of the sky which was
visible through the bared trees in the park, she recognised with every
fibre of her body as unerringly as with her intellect that she had come
at last into that knowledge which is the centre of outgoing life. And as
Adams had seen in his deeper vision, that all life is an evolution into
the consciousness of God, so she divined now through her mere vague
instinct for light, that all emotion is but the blind striving of love
after the consciousness of itself. Her whole experience flashed back
before her, and in that swiftness of memory which prefigures either an
accession of vitality or a tragic death, she understood that both her
illusion and her disenchantment were necessary to the building of the
structure within her soul. She had mounted by her mistake as surely as
by her aspiration, and every pang which she had suffered was but the
rending of the veil between her flesh and spirit.
Looking up as she walked she saw, without surprise, that Adams was
standing under the bared trees before her; and with her first glance
into his face she realised that there are moments charged with so deep a
meaning that all explanations, all promises, all self-reproaches become
only such vain and barren things as words.
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