"She is a healthy, simple woman. I want healthy, simple children. That's how we ought all to be: healthy and simple as she is."
Were those not the ideas which had made him introduce her into the midst of them all, as an object lesson, without listening to the still, slumbering voices of his soul's soul? . . . And scarcely had those voices awakened before he had been roused out of himself with the thought:
"After all, I found her. Why should I lose her now? Who am I, this one or the other? And, if I am both those whom I feel within me, how can I unite them and compel them into a single love for my wife, for the woman who gives me healthy, simple children?"
And, every day that passed, he had known less for himself, whatever he might know for all of them whom he approached and benefited by strange influence, knowing less and less daily, until he saw himself plainly as two and gave up the struggle, let himself go, allowed his soul to drift at the will of the two streams that dragged him along, in weakness and surrender and lack of knowledge for himself, whereas he sometimes knew so clearly for others. Self-knowledge escaped him. . . . And, if Mathilde had been able to see this, in her husband, she would have shrunk back and been dismayed at what, all incomprehensible to her, existed secretly in the most mystic part of him. She would have been shocked by it as by a never-suspected riddle, she would have turned giddy as at a never-suspected abyss down which she gazed without knowing where it ended, a bottomless depth to her ignorant eyes and quite insusceptible instincts. She would not have understood, she would have refused to understand that there was no blame but only self-insufficiency and inconsistency of soul, in
