Shouldn't have felt!
The phrase was self-contradictory. Feelings weren't decorative
abstractions which you selected according to your best moral and
esthetic judgment out of an unlimited stock, and ordered wrapped and
sent home. They were things that happened to you. In this case, two
violently opposed feelings of terrible intensity had happened to him at
once; had torn each other, and, in their struggle, had torn him.
Justified or not, it was her act in leaving him, that had turned those
feelings loose upon him. It was through her that he had suffered; that
was plain enough. It must have been terribly plain to him.
And yet, despite the suffering she had caused him, he had crucified his
pride again and come to find her; not with reproaches, with utter
contrition and humility. The measures he'd suggested for easing their
strained situation were, to be sure, maddeningly beside the mark. The
fact that he'd offered them betrayed his complete failure to understand
the situation. But it had cost him, evidently, as much pain to work them
out and bring them to her, as if they had been the real solvents he took
them for.
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