Changes of Home

From this time my intercourse with William Edgerton was, on my part,
one of the most painful and difficult constraint. I had nothing to
reproach him with; no grounds whatever for quarrel; and could not,
in his case--regarding the long intimacy which I had maintained with
himself and father, and the obligations which were due from me to
both--adopt such a manner of reserve and distance as to produce
the result of indifference and estrangement which I now anxiously
desired. I was still compelled to meet him--meet him, too, with
an affectation of good feeling and good humor, which I soon found
it, of all things in the world, the most difficult even to pretend.
How much would I have given could he only have provoked me to anger
on any ground--could he have given me an occasion for difference
of any sort or to any degree--anything which could have justified
a mutual falling off from the old intimacy! But William Edgerton
was meekness and kindness itself. His confidence in me was of
the most unobservant, suspicionless character; either that, or
I succeeded better than I thought in the effort to maintain the
external aspects of old friendship. He saw nothing of change in my
deportment. He seemed not to see it, at least; and came as usual,
or more frequently than usual, to my house, until, at length, the
studio of my wife was quite as much his as hers--nay, more; for,
after a brief space, whether it was that Julia saw what troubled me,
or felt herself the imprudence of Edgerton's conduct, she almost
entirely surrendered it to him. She was not now so often to be seen
in it.