From now on he was going
to act like a reasonable man, not like a distracted one.
He had his bag packed and his tickets bought the next morning, went to
the office and put things in train to accommodate a week's absence,
wrote a note to Frederica telling her of his discovery that Rose had
left the company of _The Girl Up-stairs_, and of his hope of finding her
in California with her mother and Portia; and when he settled himself in
his compartment for the three-day ride he even had two or three books in
his bag to pass the time with, as if it had been an ordinary journey. He
didn't make much of them, it's true, but his honest attempt to, gave him
the glimmering dawn of a discovery.
The cardinal principle of his life, if such a thing could be stated in a
phrase, was self-expression through self-discipline. Well, his discovery
was (it didn't come to much more than a surmise, it is true, but it was
a beginning) that in his relations to Rose he'd never disciplined
himself at all. The network of his instincts, passions, desires, that
had involved her, had been allowed to grow unchecked, unscrutinized.
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