She demanded
a great deal of herself and of the people
she loved; and she never failed herself.
If he told her now, he knew, it would be
irretrievable. There would be no going back.
He would lose the thing he valued most in
the world; he would be destroying himself
and his own happiness. There would be
nothing for him afterward. He seemed to see
himself dragging out a restless existence on
the Continent--Cannes, Hyeres, Algiers, Cairo--
among smartly dressed, disabled men of
every nationality; forever going on journeys
that led nowhere; hurrying to catch trains
that he might just as well miss; getting up in
the morning with a great bustle and splashing
of water, to begin a day that had no purpose
and no meaning; dining late to shorten the
night, sleeping late to shorten the day.
And for what? For a mere folly, a masquerade,
a little thing that he could not let go.
AND HE COULD EVEN LET IT GO, he told himself.
But he had promised to be in London at mid-
summer, and he knew that he would go. . . .
It was impossible to live like this any longer.
And this, then, was to be the disaster
that his old professor had foreseen for him:
the crack in the wall, the crash, the cloud
of dust. And he could not understand how it
had come about. He felt that he himself was
unchanged, that he was still there, the same
man he had been five years ago, and that he
was sitting stupidly by and letting some
resolute offshoot of himself spoil his life for
him.
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