elf how he would take it;
he was asking himself how he would bear it. He was amused to observe
that the pathetic old human vanity, by no means stunned, was pushing its
head above the tossing surface in order to assure him again and again
that he would bear it very well. It should be a graceful and gallant
exit. If there were to be dark moments, moments when the cavern sucked
him in and had him, if he was to know horror and despair, no one else,
at all events, should know that he knew them; no one else should share
his suffering. Up to the edge of extinction he would keep silence and a
stoic cheerfulness. The doctor had promised him that there would be
little pain; there would be knowledge only to conceal.

This vanity, and there was satisfaction in it for all his ironic
insight, was not so selfish as it seemed; the next turn of thought led
him to this. For no one had a right to share his suffering; or perhaps
it would be more magnanimous to say that the some one of whom he was
thinking had a right to be spared the sharing of it. He shared so few of
the things that mattered with Kitty that she might well claim immunity.
His wife's figure, since the very beginning, had been hovering near his
thoughts, not once looked at directly. It might be horribly painful to
look at it, but he suspected that it would not be so painful as to look
at the other near thing that he must leave behind: his work; the work
that with all its grind and routine--so hard to harness to at first--had
now become so much a part of himself. The fact that he might come nearer
to despair, nearer to the crumbling edge of the cavern, when he thought
of leaving his work than when he thought of leaving his wife, was in
itself a pain; but it was an old pain in a new guise. Kitty had for so
long been one of the things that counted for less than his work. Vanity
even raised its voice high enough to say ruefully that they might get on
badly without him at the Home Office; the country itself might suffer.
He smiled; but the dart told; it was perhaps feathered with truth. Yes,
everything most essential in him, everything that most counted, was
answered, called forth in his work. It was in that that he would most
truly die. For, of course, in the many other, the young, the ardent, the
foolish hopes, he was dead already. And it was round the figure of his
wife, that light and radiant figure, sweet, soft, appealing, that those
dead hopes seemed to gather, like mist abo