This fit of hot anger was succeeded by a sudden sadness, by the darkening passage of a thought that ran over the scorched surface of his heart, like upon a barren plain, and after a fiercer assault of sunrays, the melancholy and cooling shadow of a cloud.  He realized that he had had a shock—­not a violent or rending blow, that can be seen, resisted, returned, forgotten, but a thrust, insidious and penetrating, that had stirred all those feelings, concealed and cruel, which the arts of the devil, the fears of mankind—­God’s infinite compassion, perhaps—­keep chained deep down in the inscrutable twilight of our breasts.  A dark curtain seemed to rise before him, and for less than a second he looked upon the mysterious universe of moral suffering.  As a landscape is seen complete, and vast, and vivid, under a flash of lightning, so he could see disclosed in a moment all the immensity of pain that can be contained in one short moment of human thought.  Then the curtain fell again, but his rapid vision left in Alvan Hervey’s mind a trail of invincible sadness, a sense of loss and bitter solitude, as though he had been robbed and exiled.  For a moment he ceased to be a member of society with a position, a career, and a name attached to all this, like a descriptive label of some complicated compound.  He was a simple human being removed from the delightful world of crescents and squares.  He stood alone, naked and afraid, like the first man on the first day of evil.  There are in life events, contacts, glimpses, that seem brutally to bring all the past to a close.  There is a shock and a crash, as of a gate flung to behind one by the perfidious hand of fate.  Go and seek another paradise, fool or sage.  There is a moment of dumb dismay, and the wanderings must begin again; the painful explaining away of facts, the feverish raking up of illusions, the cultivation of a fresh crop of lies in the sweat of one’s brow, to sustain life, to make it supportable, to make it fair, so as to hand intact to another generation of blind wanderers the charming legend of a heartless country, of a promised land, all flowers and blessings . . .

He came to himself with a slight start, and became aware of an oppressive, crushing desolation.  It was only a feeling, it is true, but it produced on him a physical effect, as though his chest had been squeezed in a vice.  He perceived himself so extremely forlorn and lamentable, and was moved so deeply by the oppressive sorrow, that another turn of the screw, he felt, would bring tears out of his eyes.  He was deteriorating.  Five years of life in common had appeased his longing.  Yes, long-time ago.  The first five months did that—­but . . .  There was the habit—­the habit of her person, of her smile, of her gestures, of her voice, of her silence.  She had a pure brow and good hair.  How utterly wretched all this was.  Good hair and fine eyes—­remarkably fine.  He was surprised by the number of details that intruded