to have loathed and avoided from
every point of view?"

That had disposed of it so long as he cared, and by the time he had
ceased to care for anything it had also lost itself in the rest of the
vain babble of home. After his wife's death, during his year of mortal
solitude, it awoke again as an echo of far-off things--far-off, very
far-off, because he felt then not ten but twenty years older. That was
by reason simply of the dead weight with which his load of debt had
settled--the persistence of his misery dragging itself out. With all
that had come and gone the bench of desolation was still there, just as
the immortal flush of the westward sky kept hanging its indestructible
curtain. He had never got away--everything had left him, but he himself
had been able to turn his back on nothing--and now, his day's labour
before a dirty desk at the Gas Works ended, he more often than not,
almost any season at temperate Properley serving his turn, took his slow
straight way to the Land's End and, collapsing there to rest, sat often
for an hour at a time staring before him. He might in these sessions,
with his eyes on the grey-green sea, have been counting again and
still recounting the beads, almost all worn smooth, of his rosary of
pain--which had for the fingers of memory and the recurrences of wonder
the same felt break of the smaller ones by the larger that would have
aided a pious mumble in some dusky altar-chapel.

If it has been said of him that when once full submersion, as from far
back, had visibly begun to await him, he watched himself, in a cold
lucidity, _do_ punctually and necessarily each of the deplorable things
that were inconsistent with his keeping afloat, so at present again he
might have been held agaze just by the presented grotesqueness of that
vigil. Such ghosts of dead seasons were all he _had_ now to watch--such
a recaptured sense for instance as that of the dismal unavailing
awareness that had attended his act of marriage. He had let submersion
final and absolute become the signal for it--a mere minor determinant
having been the more or less contemporaneously unfavourable effect on
the business of Drury & Dean of the sudden disappearance of Mr. Dean
with the single small tin box into which the certificates of the
firm's credit had been found to be compressible. That had been his
only form--or had at any rate seemed his only one. He couldn't not have
married, no doubt, just as he couldn't not have su