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.

He had met her for the first time when he was a lad of twenty, and she
a girl of eighteen.