Perhaps it was partly
owing to the established association of ideas that, despite the utter
change in my circumstances, I fell into a state of profound depression
on the afternoon of this my first Sunday in the twentieth century.

It was not, however, on the present occasion a depression without
specific cause, the mere vague melancholy I have spoken of, but a
sentiment suggested and certainly quite justified by my position. The
sermon of Mr. Barton, with its constant implication of the vast moral
gap between the century to which I belonged and that in which I found
myself, had had an effect strongly to accentuate my sense of loneliness
in it. Considerately and philosophically as he had spoken, his words
could scarcely have failed to leave upon my mind a strong impression of
the mingled pity, curiosity, and aversion which I, as a representative
of an abhorred epoch, must excite in all around me.

The extraordinary kindness with which I had been treated by Dr. Leete
and his family, and especially the goodness of Edith, had hitherto
prevented my fully realizing that their real sentiment toward me must
necessarily be that of the whole generation to which they belonged. The
recognition of this, as regarded Dr. Leete and his amiable wife,
however painful, I might have endured, but the conviction that Edith
must share their feeling was more than I could bear.

The crushing effect with which this belated perception of a fact so
obvious came to me opened my eyes fully to something which perhaps the
reader has already suspected,--I loved Edith.

Was it strange that I did? The affecting occasion on which our intimacy
had begun, when her hands had drawn me out of the whirlpool of madness;
the fact that her sympathy was the vital breath which had set me up in
this new life and enabled me to support it; my habit of looking to her
as the mediator between me and the world around in a sense that even
her father was not,--these were circumstances that had predetermined a
result which her remarkable loveliness of person and disposition would
alone have accounted for. It was quite inevitable that she should have
come to seem to me, in a sense quite different from the usual
experience of lovers, the only woman in this world. Now that I had
become suddenly sensible of the fatuity of the hopes I had begun to
cherish, I suffered not merely what another lover might, but in
addition a desolate loneliness, an utter forlornness, such as no oth