Thus, through all the tension of his soul, his intellect still struggled for comprehension.
Meanwhile, from his window looking over the white-walled harbor, he could see the _Windward_ with all her sails spread, outward bound.
He watched her till there was nothing to be seen but her flying sails, till the sails were one white wing on a dim violet sea, till the white wing was a gray dot, indistinct on the margin of the world.
He cared immensely. But not to come behind her in generosity and comprehension he owned that he had no right to complain because this remarkable woman loved the world better than one man, even if that man happened to be himself; in fact, while his heart revolted against it, his pure intellect admired her attitude, for the world is a greater thing that any man in it.
Now and again letters reached him across seas and continents, letters with strange, outlandish postmarks, wonderful, graphic, triumphant letters, which showed him plainly, though unintentionally, that Frida Tancred was still on the winning side, that she could do without him. Across seas and continents he watched her career with a sad and cynical sympathy, as a man naturally watches a woman who triumphs where he has failed.
Meanwhile he lived on her letters, long and expansive, or short and to the point. They proved a stimulating diet; they had so much of her full-blooded personality in them. His own grew shorter and shorter and more and more to the point, till at last he wrote: "Delightful. Only tell me when you've had enough of it."
The answer to that came bounding, as it were, from the other side of the Atlantic. "Not yet. I shall never have enough of it. I've only been 'seeing the world,' only traveling from point to point along an infinite surface, and there's no satisfaction in that. I'm not tired--not tired, Maurice, remember. I don't want to stop. I want to strike down--deeper. It doesn't matter what point you take, so long as you strike down. Just at present I'm off for India."
Her postscript said: "If you ever hear of me doing queer things, remember they were all in the day's pleasure or the day's work."
He remembered--that Frida was only thirty-five; which was young for Frida. And he said to himself, "It is all very well now, but what will she be in another three years? I will give her another three years. By that time she will be tired of the world, or the world will be tired of her, which comes to the same thing, and her heart (for she has a heart) will find her out. With Frida you never know. I will wait and see."