XIX
CAPITULATION
Grimly Whitaker sat himself down in the kitchen and prepared to wait the
reappearance of his wife—prepared to wait as long as life was in him, so that he
were there to welcome her when, her paroxysm over, she would come to him to
be comforted, soothed and reasoned out of her distorted conception of her
destiny.
Not that he had the heart to blame or to pity her for that terrified vision of life.
Her history was her excuse. Nor was his altogether a blameless figure in that history. At least it was not so in his sight. Though unwittingly, he had blundered
cruelly in all his relations with the life of that sad little child of the Commercial House.
Like sunlight penetrating storm wrack, all the dark disarray of his revery was shot through and through by the golden spl
