nderstood her and not only went to
the door with her but down the stairs as well. And she walked home
treasuring the memory of his smile.

XIX

The day Jeffrey began to spade up the ground he knew he had got hold of
something bigger than the handle of the spade. It was something rudely
beneficent, because it kept him thinking about his body and the best way
to use it, and it sent him to bed so tired he lay there aching. Not
aching for long though: now he could sleep. That seemed to him the only
use he could put himself to: he could work hard enough to forget he had
much of an identity except this physical one. He had not expected to
escape that horrible waking time between three and four in the morning
when he had seen his life as an ignorant waste of youth and power. It
was indeed confusion, nothing but that: the confusion of overwhelming
love for Esther, of a bravado of display when he made money for them
both to spend, of the arrogant sense that there was always time enough,
strength enough, sheer brilliant insight enough to dance with life and
drink with it and then have abundance of everything left. And suddenly
the clock had struck, the rout was over and there was nothing left. It
had all been forfeit. He hardly knew how he had come out of prison so
drained of courage when he had been so roistering with it before he went
in. Sometimes he had thought, at three o'clock in the morning, that it
was Esther who had drained him: she, sweet, helpless, delicate flower of
life. She had not merely been swayed by the wind that worsted him. She
had perhaps been broken by it. Or at least it had done something
inexplicable which he, entirely out of communication with her, had not
been able to understand. And he had come back to find her more lovely
than ever, and wearing no mark of the inner cruelties he had suffered
and had imagined she must share with him.

He believed that his stay in prison had given him an illuminating idea
of what hell really is: the vision of heaven and a certainty of the
closed door. Confronted with an existence pared down to the satisfying
of its necessities, he had loathed the idea of luxury while he hated the
daily meagreness. Life had stopped for him when he entered inexorable
bounds. It could not, he knew, be set going. Some clocks have merely
stopped. Others are smashed. It had been the only satisfaction of his
craving instincts to build up a scheme of conduct for the prison paper:
but i