lously revealed. I did,
indeed, stand suddenly stock still in the wood, and staring down the
darkening vista of the path, saw not the entranced twilight that was
sinking the path in a pool of olive green shadows, but a kind of bioscopic
presentation of my own futile, monotonous existence.

If Anne would have nothing to do with me, what, I asked myself, did the
world hold that could conceivably make my life worth living?

I suppose most men and women have asked themselves the same question when
they have been unexpectedly stirred by a great love. The sense of
unworthiness comes with a shock of surprise that seems violently to tear
open the comfortable cloak of self-satisfaction. I had been content with
my life, even a little vain of my achievement, until that last
conversation with Anne; now I loathed the thought of my own inefficiency
and all my prospects of success appeared unendurably tame. I was in the
spiritual state of a religious convert, suddenly convinced of sin.

And yet somehow in the depths of my consciousness there was a sensible
stir of resentment. The artificial being I had created during my
thirty-two years of life had an existence of its own and protested against
this threat of instant annihilation. I wanted to defend myself, and I was
petulantly irritable because I could find no defence.

For the strange Fate that had planned this astounding revelation to me,
had apparently led up to it by the subtlest arrangement of properties and
events. My disgrace at the Jervaises' had prepared me for this moment. My
responses to humiliation had been, as it were, tested and strained by that
ordeal. And at the same time I had been powerfully influenced to despise
the life of the Jervaises and all that they stood for, socially and
ethically. Then, almost without a pause, a new ideal of life had been
presented to me; and the contrast had been so vivid as to awaken even my
dulled powers of apprehension. The Jervaise type was more or less familiar
to me; their acceptance of security as an established right, their lack of
anything like initiative, their general contentment with themselves, their
standards of judgment and their surroundings, represented the attitude
towards life with which I was most familiar. It had been my own attitude.
I had even dreamed of re-establishing the half-ruined home of the elder
branch of the Melhuish family in Derbyshire!

And the contrast afforded by the lives and ambitions of Anne and h