Francis kept this letter and through his hours of torment often read it. It let in air.
_Fear, and the pit, and the snare, are upon thee, O inhabitant of the earth._ ISAIAH, xxiv. 17.
IT is one of the most disconcerting phenomena of existence that, when passionate love has answered its purpose, it simply disappears, leaving its instruments wedded by such truth as they have discovered in each other or divorced by the lies they have forged for each other's delight. Very rarely, however, is the issue so simple. The bone-and-shadow business comes into play here also, and most people marry with very little passionate love and a great deal of careful imitation of it, so that most marriages are strangled in their birth with a very tangled web of lies.
It was so with Frederic and Jessie Folyat in their marriage, and they were never so nearly united as when jealousy came between them. Their marriage feast did coldly furnish forth the funeral of love, and over love's dead body they quarrelled. They had scenes, hysterical skirmishes and almost as hysterical reconciliations. There was grim sport in it all, a sort of fascination in the stealthy prying and spying, each crouching and shrinking in readiness for the other's spring, the snarling bravado with which each dared the other to come on, a little further, a little further, inviting to a caress, repelling with a scratching blow; and all smooth-seeming, veiled, polite, with polished airs and graceful manners and feigned interest and inquiry: a pooling of the common stock only to wrangle over the division of it again. The gambling fever was in it. At any moment all might be lost upon a throw, a little gain, a little loss, more gain, more gain, a little more and the other might be beggared, the game won. But neither dared let the game come to an end. When one was near ruin, grey-faced, anxiously glaring for the turn of the card, the other cheated and the game went on. It absorbed both. Neither could do without it. It was a drug. Their craving for it was agony; its satisfaction a seeming delight.
They were very skilful and cunning to let no trace of it appear on the surface of their lives. Frederic abandoned all pursuit of Annie Lipsett, he deserted the company of his flattering fools, for these things trespassed upon the field of his fevered sport. It was very rarely that they went of their own accord to seek purchasable pleasures. Visits they paid, when politeness and discretion compelled, and everybody found them charming. They could be good company and their talents were useful. They became popular and were much in request to organise entertainments, bazaars, jumble sales, and such functions.