ous, wonderful world
he belonged to by rights? How did he come to be thrown on this
refuse-heap where he was?

He was as if mad. The horror of the brick buildings, of the
tram-car, of the ashen-grey people in the street made him
reeling and blind as if drunk. He went mad. He had lived with
her in a close, living, pulsing world, where everything pulsed
with rich being. Now he found himself struggling amid an
ashen-dry, cold world of rigidity, dead walls and mechanical
traffic, and creeping, spectre-like people. The life was
extinct, only ash moved and stirred or stood rigid, there was a
horrible, clattering activity, a rattle like the falling of dry
slag, cold and sterile. It was as if the sunshine that fell were
unnatural light exposing the ash of the town, as if the lights
at night were the sinister gleam of decomposition.

Quite mad, beside himself, he went to his club and sat with a
glass of whisky, motionless, as if turned to clay. He felt like
a corpse that is inhabited with just enough life to make it
appear as any other of the spectral, unliving beings which we
call people in our dead language. Her absence was worse than
pain to him. It destroyed his being.

Dead, he went on from lunch to tea. His face was all the time
fixed and stiff and colourless, his life was a dry, mechanical
movement. Yet even he wondered slightly at the awful misery that
had overcome him. How could he be so ashlike and extinct? He
wrote her a letter.

I have been thinking that we must get married before long. My
pay will be more when I get out to India, we shall be able to
get along. Or if you don't want to go to India, I could very
probably stay here in England. But I think you would like India.
You could ride, and you would know just everybody out there.
Perhaps if you stay on to take your degree, we might marry
immediately after that. I will write to your father as soon as I
hear from you----

He went on, disposing of her. If only he could be with her!
All he wanted now was to marry her, to be sure of her. Yet all
the time he was perfectly, perfectly hopeless, cold, extinct,
without emotion or connection.

He felt as if his life were dead. His soul was extinct. The
whole being of him had become sterile, he was a spectre,
divorced from life. He had no fullness, he was just a flat
shape. Day by day the madness accumulated in him. The horror of
not-being possessed him.

He went here, there, and everywhere. But whatever he did,