Margaret, with red-bordered, glittering eyes, answered, staring all the while at that body:  “No, Mary.  It’s no use.  I can’t leave him.  I won’t leave him!”

But she wasn’t thinking about me at all.  There I was, neglected and shivering, near the windows; and she would not look at me!

After an interminable palaver Margaret induced the servant to leave the room.  And she sat down on the chair nearest the bed, and began to cry again, not troubling to wipe her eyes.  She sobbed, more and more loudly, and kept touching that body.  She seized my gold watch, which hung over the bed, and which she wound up every night, and kissed it and put it back.  Her sobs continued to increase.  Then the door opened quietly, and the servant, half-undressed, crept in, and without saying a word gently led Margaret out of the room.  Margaret’s last glance was at that body.  In a moment the servant returned and extinguished the gas, and departed again, very carefully closing the door.  I was now utterly abandoned.

IV

All that had happened to me up to now was strange; but what followed was still more strange and still less capable of being described in human language.

I became aware that I was gradually losing the sensation of being cut off from intercourse, at any-rate that the sensation was losing its painfulness.  I didn’t seem to care, now, whether I was neglected or not.  And to be cast out from humanity grew into a matter of indifference to me.  I became aware, too, of the approach of a mysterious freedom.  I was not free, I could still move only an inch or so in any direction; but I felt that a process of dissolving of bonds had begun.  What manner of bonds?  I don’t know.  I felt—­that was all.  My indifference slowly passed into a sad and deep pity for the world.  The world seemed to me so pathetic, so awry, so obstinate in its honest illusions, so silly in its dishonest pretences.  “Have I been content with that?” I thought, staggered.  And I was sorry for what I had been.  I perceived that the ideals of my life were tawdry, that even the best were poor little things.  And I perceived that it was the same with everyone, and that even the greatest men, those men that I had so profoundly admired as of another clay than mine, were as like the worst as one sheep was like another sheep.  Weep—­because nature had ejected me from that petty little world, with its ridiculous and conceited wrongness?  What an idea!  Why, I said to myself, that world spends nearly the whole of its time in moving physical things from one place to another.  Change the position of matter—­that is all it does, all it thinks of.  I remembered a statesman who had referred to the London and North-Western Railway as being one of the glories of England!  Parcels!  Parcels!  Parcels, human, brute, insensate!  Nothing but parcel-moving!  I smiled.  And then I perceived that I could understand and solve problems which had defied thousands of years of human philosophy, problems which we on earth called fundamental.  And lo!  They were not in the least fundamental, but were trifles, as simple as Euclid.  It was surprising that the solution of them had not presented itself to me before!  I thought:  With one word, one single word, I could enlighten the human race beyond all that it has ever learned.  Feeble-bodied, feeble-minded humanity!