Ever since Robin’s death he had lived in towns, and had walked about streets.  He had been for a time in Paris, then in Marseilles, where he had stayed for more than two months haunted by an idea of crossing over to Africa and losing himself in the vastness of the lands of the sun.  But something had held him back, perhaps a dread of the immense loneliness which would surely beset him on the other side of the sea; and he had gone to Geneva, then to Zurich, to Milan, Genoa, Naples, Berlin and Budapest.  From Budapest he had come to Constantinople.  He had known the loneliness of cities, but an instinct had led him to avoid the loneliness of the silent and solitary places.  There had been an atmosphere of peace in quiet Welsley.  He was afraid of such an atmosphere and had sought always its opposite.

“Why have I come here?” he thought again.

In this small place he felt exposed, almost as if he were naked and could be seen by strangers.  In Pera at least he was covered.

“I shall have to go away from here,” he thought.

He got up from the bed and began to unpack.  As he did this, the uselessness of what he was doing, the arid futility of every bit of the web of small details which, in their sum, were his life, flowed upon his soul like stagnant water forced into movement by some horrible machinery.  He was like something agitating in a vast void, something whose incessant movements produced no effect, had no sort of relation to anything.  In his loneliness of the cities he had begun to lose that self-respect which belongs to all happy Englishmen of his type.  Mrs. Clarke had immediately noticed that certain details in his dress showed a beginning of neglect.  Since he had met her he had rectified them, almost unconsciously.  But now suddenly the burden of detail seemed unbearable.

It was only by an almost fierce exercise of the will that he forced himself to finish unpacking, and to lay his things out neatly in drawers and on the dressing-table.  Then he took off his boots and his jacket, stretched himself out on the bed with his arms behind him and his hands grasping the bedstead, and shut his eyes.

There was something shameful in his flaccid idleness, in the aimlessness of his whole life now, devoid of all work, undirected towards any effort.  But that was not his fault.  He had worked with energy in business, with equal energy in play, worked for self’s sake, for love’s sake, and for country’s sake.  And for all he had done, for his effort of purity as a boy and a youth, for his effort of love as a husband and a father, for his effort of valor as a soldier, he had been rewarded with the most horrible punishment which can fall upon a man.  Effort, therefore, on his part was useless; it was worse than useless, it was grotesque.  Let others make their efforts, his were done.

He wished that he could sleep.

* * * * *

The dreadful inertia of Dion did not seem to be dreadful to Mrs. Clarke.  Perhaps she was more intelligent than most women, and generated within herself so much energy of some kind that she was not driven to seek for it in others; or perhaps she was more sympathetic, more imaginative, than most women, and pardoned because she understood.  At any rate, she accepted Dion as he was, and neither criticized him, attempted to bully him, nor seemed to wish to change him.