‘Pulped—­pulped; pulped—­pulped.’  The hateful word beat rhythmically again and again in his tired brain; and for a little while that was all he was conscious of.

So much for the work of his life.  And for the rest?  The play?  The living?  Oh, he had nothing to recall but failure.  It had sufficed that he should desire a thing, for him to miss it; that he should set his heart upon a thing, for it to be removed beyond the sphere of his possible acquisition.  It had been so from the beginning; it had been so always.  He sat motionless as a stone, and allowed his thoughts to drift listlessly hither and thither in the current of memory.  Everywhere they encountered wreckage, derelicts; defeated aspirations, broken hopes.  Languidly he envisaged these.  He was too tired to resent, to rebel.  He even found a certain sluggish satisfaction in recognising with what unvarying harshness destiny had treated him, in resigning himself to the unmerited.

He caught sight of his hand, lying flat and inert upon the brown leather arm of his chair.  His eyes rested on it, and for the moment he forgot everything else in a sort of torpid study of it.  How white it was, how thin, how withered; the nails were parched into minute corrugations; the veins stood out like dark wires; the skin hung loosely on it, and had a dry lustre:  an old man’s hand.  He gazed at it fixedly, till his eyes closed and his head fell forward.  But he was not sleepy, he was only tired and weak.

He raised his head with a start and changed his position.  He felt cold; but to endure the cold was easier than to get up, and put something on, or go to bed.

How silent the world was; how empty his room.  An immense feeling of solitude, of isolation, fell upon him.  He was quite cut off from the rest of humanity here.  If anything should happen to him, if he should need help of any sort, what could he do?  Call out?  But who would hear?  At nine in the morning the porter’s wife would come with his tea.  But if anything should happen to him in the meantime?  There would be nothing for it but to wait till nine o’clock.

Ah, if he had married, if he had had children, a wife, a home of his own, instead of these desolate bachelor chambers!

If he had married, indeed!  It was his sorrow’s crown of sorrow that he had not married, that he had not been able to marry, that the girl he had wished to marry wouldn’t have him.  Failure?  Success?  He could have accounted failure in other things a trifle, he could have laughed at what the world calls failure, if Elinor Lynd had been his wife.  But that was the heart of his misfortune, she wouldn’t have him.