The sleeping-car had sunk into its night-silence.
Through the wet window-pane she watched the sudden lights, the long
stretches of hurrying blackness. Now and then she turned her head and
looked through the opening in the hangings at her husband's curtains
across the aisle....
She wondered restlessly if he wanted anything and if she could hear him if
he called. His voice had grown very weak within the last months and it
irritated him when she did not hear. This irritability, this increasing
childish petulance seemed to give expression to their imperceptible
estrangement. Like two faces looking at one another through a sheet of
glass they were close together, almost touching, but they could not hear
or feel each other: the conductivity between them was broken. She, at
least, had this sense of separation, and she fancied sometimes that she
saw it reflected in the look with which he supplemented his failing words.
Doubtless the fault was hers. She was too impenetrably healthy to be
touched by the irrelevancies of disease. Her self-reproachful tenderness
was tinged with the sense of his irrationality: she had a vague feeling
that there was a purpose in his helpless tyrannies. The suddenness of the
change had found her so unprepared. A year ago their pulses had beat to
one robust measure; both had the same prodigal confidence in an
exhaustless future. Now their energies no longer kept step: hers still
bounded ahead of life, preempting unclaimed regions of hope and activity,
while his lagged behind, vainly struggling to overtake her.
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