d him; it might have been
written by an unintelligent schoolboy. He tore the paper in pieces, and
shut and locked his desk, heavy despair sinking like lead into his heart.
For the rest of that day he lay motionless on the bed, smoking pipe after
pipe in the hope of stupefying himself with tobacco fumes. The air in the
room became blue and thick with smoke; it was bitterly cold, and he
wrapped himself up in his great-coat and drew the counterpane over him.
The night came on and the window darkened, and at last he fell asleep.

He renewed the effort at intervals, only to plunge deeper into misery. He
felt the approaches of madness, and knew that his only hope was to walk
till he was physically exhausted, so that he might come home almost
fainting with fatigue, but ready to fall asleep the moment he got into
bed. He passed the mornings in a kind of torpor, endeavoring to avoid
thought, to occupy his mind with the pattern of the paper, with the
advertisements at the end of a book, with the curious greyness of the
light that glimmered through the mist into his room, with the muffled
voices that rumbled now and then from the street. He tried to make out
the design that had once colored the faded carpet on the floor, and
wondered about the dead artist in Japan, the adorner of his bureau. He
speculated as to what his thoughts had been as he inserted the rainbow
mother-of-pearl and made that great flight of shining birds, dipping
their wings as they rose from the reeds, or how he had conceived the
lacquer dragons in red gold, and the fantastic houses in the garden of
peach-trees. But sooner or later the oppression of his grief returned,
the loud shriek and clang of the garden-gate, the warning bell of some
passing bicyclist steering through the fog, the noise of his pipe falling
to the floor, would suddenly awaken him to the sense of misery. He knew
that it was time to go out; he could not bear to sit still and suffer.
Sometimes she cut a slice of bread and put it in his pocket, sometimes he
trusted to the chance of finding a public-house, where he could have a
sandwich and a glass of beer. He turned always from the main streets and
lost himself in the intricate suburban byways, willing to be engulfed in
the infinite whiteness of the mist.

The roads had stiffened into iron ridges, the fences and trees were
glittering with frost crystals, everything was of strange and altered
aspect. Lucian walked on and on through the maze, now