He got it at last, after more exertion than he expected; he was flushed and puffed a little as though he had been catching it with his hands, but his mental hold on it was weak, so weak that he judged it necessary to repeat it aloud—­to hear it spoken firmly—­in order to insure a perfect measure of possession.  But he was unwilling to hear his own voice—­to hear any sound whatever—­owing to a vague belief, shaping itself slowly within him, that solitude and silence are the greatest felicities of mankind.  The next moment it dawned upon him that they are perfectly unattainable—­that faces must be seen, words spoken, thoughts heard.  All the words—­all the thoughts!

He said very distinctly, and looking at the carpet, “She’s gone.”

It was terrible—­not the fact but the words; the words charged with the shadowy might of a meaning, that seemed to possess the tremendous power to call Fate down upon the earth, like those strange and appalling words that sometimes are heard in sleep.  They vibrated round him in a metallic atmosphere, in a space that had the hardness of iron and the resonance of a bell of bronze.  Looking down between the toes of his boots he seemed to listen thoughtfully to the receding wave of sound; to the wave spreading out in a widening circle, embracing streets, roofs, church-steeples, fields—­and travelling away, widening endlessly, far, very far, where he could not hear—­where he could not imagine anything—­where . . .

“And—­with that . . . ass,” he said again without stirring in the least.  And there was nothing but humiliation.  Nothing else.  He could derive no moral solace from any aspect of the situation, which radiated pain only on every side.  Pain.  What kind of pain?  It occurred to him that he ought to be heart-broken; but in an exceedingly short moment he perceived that his suffering was nothing of so trifling and dignified a kind.  It was altogether a more serious matter, and partook rather of the nature of those subtle and cruel feelings which are awakened by a kick or a horse-whipping.

He felt very sick—­physically sick—­as though he had bitten through something nauseous.  Life, that to a well-ordered mind should be a matter of congratulation, appeared to him, for a second or so, perfectly intolerable.  He picked up the paper at his feet, and sat down with the wish to think it out, to understand why his wife—­his wife!—­should leave him, should throw away respect, comfort, peace, decency, position throw away everything for nothing!  He set himself to think out the hidden logic of her action—­a mental undertaking fit for the leisure hours of a madhouse, though he couldn’t see it.  And he thought of his wife in every relation except the only fundamental one.  He thought of her as a well-bred girl, as a wife, as a cultured person, as the mistress of a house, as a lady; but he never for a moment thought of her simply as a woman.