In the night, fever, pain, fatigue—­it may be the indigestion of my supper of bread and cheese—­roused me at last out of a hag-rid sleep to face despair.  I was a soul lost amidst desolations and shame, dishonored, evilly treated, hopeless.  I raged against the God I denied, and cursed him as I lay.

And it was in the nature of my fever, which was indeed only half fatigue and illness, and the rest the disorder of passionate youth, that Nettie, a strangely distorted Nettie, should come through the brief dreams that marked the exhaustions of that vigil, to dominate my misery.  I was sensible, with an exaggerated distinctness, of the intensity of her physical charm for me, of her every grace and beauty; she took to herself the whole gamut of desire in me and the whole gamut of pride.  She, bodily, was my lost honor.  It was not only loss but disgrace to lose her.  She stood for life and all that was denied; she mocked me as a creature of failure and defeat.  My spirit raised itself towards her, and then the bruise upon my jaw glowed with a dull heat, and I rolled in the mud again before my rivals.

There were times when something near madness took me, and I gnashed my teeth and dug my nails into my hands and ceased to curse and cry out only by reason of the insufficiency of words.  And once towards dawn I got out of bed, and sat by my looking-glass with my revolver loaded in my hand.  I stood up at last and put it carefully in my drawer and locked it—­out of reach of any gusty impulse.  After that I slept for a little while.

Such nights were nothing rare and strange in that old order of the world.  Never a city, never a night the whole year round, but amidst those who slept were those who waked, plumbing the deeps of wrath and misery.  Countless thousands there were so ill, so troubled, they agonize near to the very border-line of madness, each one the center of a universe darkened and lost. . .

The next day I spent in gloomy lethargy.

I had intended to go to Checkshill that day, but my bruised ankle was too swollen for that to be possible.  I sat indoors in the ill-lit downstairs kitchen, with my foot bandaged, and mused darkly and read.  My dear old mother waited on me, and her brown eyes watched me and wondered at my black silences, my frowning preoccupations.  I had not told her how it was my ankle came to be bruised and my clothes muddy.  She had brushed my clothes in the morning before I got up.

Ah well!  Mothers are not treated in that way now.  That I suppose must console me.  I wonder how far you will be able to picture that dark, grimy, untidy room, with its bare deal table, its tattered wall paper, the saucepans and kettle on the narrow, cheap, but by no means economical range, the ashes under the fireplace, the rust-spotted steel fender on which my bandaged feet rested; I wonder how near you can come to seeing the scowling pale-faced hobbledehoy I was, unshaven and collarless, in the Windsor chair, and the little timid, dirty, devoted old woman who hovered about me with love peering out from her puckered eyelids. . .