The Wheel of Life by Ellen Glasgow

On the evening of the day upon which Laura was to have been married, Adams went, as usual, into his study and lit the green lamp upon his desk; but his mind was so filled with the mystery of her absence that even the pretence of distraction became unendurable. Since the news of her broken engagement and her flight had reached him, he had spent three days in a fruitless, though still hopeful, search for her; and the nights when he was forced to relax his efforts were filled with agonised imaginings of her loneliness at so great a distance and yet in reality so near. From the moment that he had heard through Gerty of her disappearance, there had ceased to exist all uncertainty as to the position in which he now stood to her; and he reproached himself, as he remembered her visit to his office, because he had failed then to take into his hands a decision which from an external view appeared so little to affect him.

But the external view, he realised, was nothing to him to-night. On that last day he had penetrated beneath the shallow surface of the conventions, and he had read in her tormented heart the whole story of the bitter disillusionment which she did not dare to put in words. Her imagination, he saw, had created an ideal lover in Kemper's shape, and in the moment of her awakening she had turned away not from the falsehood, but from the truth. "Though he is not what I loved yet I will still love him! " her heart had cried, in a subjection to the old false feminine belief that faithfulness to a mistaken ideal is not weakness but virtue. Yet in the end she had fled from that ultimate choice between the higher and the lower nature. How could she have lived on a lie when her spirit had forged so clear a path of truth before her?