which it all the time deceitfully gathered itself together for the next
onslaught.

That his instinct had always been to fight the intrusion of the
personal, that still it was so to the extent of a deadly clearness of
vision which prevented him thinking the affair of greater importance
than it was, did not prevent one shade of his pain; rather it was the
more acute for raging in spite of himself. He was powerless to do
anything but set his teeth and assure himself that it would eventually
pass. He looked at his suffering as a man may look at a broken leg: he
sees it stretched helpless before him; the pain from it ravages his
whole sense, but it is local, so that he can lay his hand upon it and
look from it to uninjured portions of his being which are yet
unconscious of immunity, so much is his whole sense occupied with the
one suffering portion.

Meanwhile Ishmael set himself to believe, or rather to realise--for he
never lost his feeling for values sufficiently ever to believe
otherwise--that all this would one day fall from off him; he even
thought that then he would be as he had been before, not yet knowing
that pain never leaves a man as it found him--that freshness of emotion
lost in any direction, it can never be recaptured. Meanwhile, now and
again, for all his philosophy, he was occasionally guilty of adding to
the sum of his own pain by deliberately indulging in it. There were
evenings when he fell on weakness and allowed himself to go over the
fields at dark to Paradise, where he would stand at the point in the
hedge whence he had been wont to watch her light. One evening there was
a light in her window, and his heart had thudded in his chest so that he
could have heard it had he been occupied in anything but clutching the
hedge with both hands and staring, half-expecting a miracle to happen
and her form to be shadowed on the blind at any moment. Sometimes, too,
as he lay in his bed after a hard day's work and sleep would have come
to him had he let it, he would start imagining, as he had been wont to
do when a little boy. Only now it was not mere cloudy, impossible dreams
of renown, of rescuing the whole family from a burning house, that
filled his mind, but reconstructions of the time with Blanche.... If he
had said this or that, something different from what he had said; if
only, if only.... And if she were to come back, how he would forget all
he had said about it being impossible to go on as they were in