This Marrying by Margaret Culkin Banning

Jim was finding it heavy going. Determined as his effort was to keep himself up to his recent, his Horatia-stirred pitch, he was forced to work harder than was reasonable or good for him. He had given up Horatia, but surely the feeling must have persisted that she might refuse to be given up and that separation for a little while would bring them together again. If he had not been so lonely it would not have been so hard for him. But many as were his acquaintances there was not one to whom he could have confided anything about himself and Horatia. When he was through with his work, and even he must admit that, if he was to work next day, each day must be allowed to end, he took long walks through the city streets, not slow, philosophic, reflective walks, but he hurried along like a man possessed or trying to get away from something -- memories perhaps. Despite his careful grooming he was thinner -- weary looking. It was very great strength which kept him from going to Horatia -- or writing her. Two or three times he went so far as to get time-tables for the trains to the hill district. And how he hungered for news of her showed in the way he spent an hour discussing politics with Seth Heatherly, just back from a cottage near Maud's -- Seth Heatherly, who bored Jim to death but who at the end of the tedious conversation said that he had seen Horatia at a club dance with young Wentworth and that he thought there was something doing. Jim left him shortly after that and yet it was not to work for he did not return to _The Journal_ office at all that afternoon. He went to his own rooms and shut himself up. There was plenty of plain masculine fierceness and jealousy left in Jim under all his careful impersonality and apparent detachment. And so two months passed and it was mid-September.

Little Miss Christie did not think Mr. Langley looked well and, coming back from her vacation, she plucked up courage to tell him that she thought he should go away for a change. Jim was courteously non-committal and a flush rose into the self-conscious freckled cheeks until Jim noticed her sense of a rebuff and spoke to her a little more personally.