For one moment she saw Edmund Grosse, and she looked him full in the face very gravely.  She did not pretend not to know him; she let him see the entirely genuine contempt she felt for him, and she meant him to understand that she would never know him again.

CHAPTER XXVI

EDMUND IS NO LONGER BORED

As the season went on Edmund Grosse did not understand himself.  Everything had gone against him, his fortune had melted, his easy-going luxurious life was at an end.  He had no delusions; he knew perfectly well the value of money in his world.  His position in that world was gone in fact, if not quite in seeming.  The sort of conversation that went on about him in his own circles had the sympathy, but would soon have also the finality, of a funeral oration.  There would soon be a tone of reminiscence in those who spoke of him.  It would be as if they said gently:  “Oh, yes! dear old Grosse, we knew him well at one time, don’t you know; it’s a sad story.”  He could have told you not only the words, but even the inflection of the voices of his friends in discussing his affairs.  He did not mean that there were no kindly faithful hearts among them.  Several might emerge as kind, as friendly as ever.  But the monster of human society would behave as it always does in self-defence.  It would shake itself, dislodge Edmund from its back, and then say quite kindly that it was a sad pity that he had fallen off.  Every organism must reject what it can no longer assimilate, and a rich society by the law of its being rejects a poor man.

And yet the idea that poor Grosse must be half crushed, horribly cut up and done for, was not in the least true.  This was what he did not understand himself.  It is well known that some people bear great trials almost lightly who take small ones very heavily.  Grosse certainly rose to the occasion.  But that a great trial had aroused great courage was not the whole explanation by any means.  Curiously enough ill-fortune with drastic severity had done for him what he had impotently wished to do for himself.  It had made impossible the life which, in his heart, he had despised; it absolutely forced him to use powers of which he was perfectly conscious, and which had been rusting simply for want of employment.  It is doubtful whether he could have roused himself for any other motive whatever.  Certainly love of Rose had been unable to do it.  The will might seem to will what he wished to do, but the effort to will strongly enough was absent.  Now all the soft, padded things between him and the depths of life had been struck away at one rude blow; he must swim or sink.  And so he began to swim, and the exercise restored his circulation and braced his whole being.