He muttered: “You must have caught that from Eva.” But he went on. I got the impression of a long and dreadful struggle on Eva’s part to find relief--relief which, at first mental, finally turned physical. She would attempt to speak, and he would talk her down. He would say, his hand upraised against an interruption: “I know you’re good at words. But they won’t help you now; you’ve got beyond words.” His hard eyes rested accusingly on her. But what they saw was not Eva but life in its futility, and what he felt was that life had no meaning, or, if it had, it had long since escaped man’s understanding. He felt all at once tired and old. Profound gloom enveloped him, touching his soul with its chilly fingers. He began walking heavily up and down Eva’s study; he did not know what to say next. He seemed, to himself, to have put into words all of the festering thoughts that he now realized had lurked within his mind for some time. And still he did not actually see Eva, there before him: she was a symbol of the irony of life. But he must have hovered over her as she shrank back in her armchair, for she screamed. He said: “Oh, I’m not going to strike you. The time for that has passed.” He went downstairs. The rooms which were so pretty in the day, and so softly alluring by lamplight, were inexpressibly sad in the cold and struggling dawn which down the side streets fought for the right to birth. The various pieces of furniture were as if shrouded in mourning habiliments. The curtains at the tall windows, hanging in straight folds to the floor, waved fitfully; and he was at first too startled to realize that this was caused by the gusts of damp air coming down the stair-well from the window that he had opened on the storey above. He went, aimlessly, into the dining-room; it had the dreariness of a banqueting hall in which no one had ever made merry over food and wine, in which no flowers had ever graced the bare mahogany boards, in which no voices had ever been raised in gay badinage. He shivered. This was what he had left to him of his home. He went back upstairs. The halls seemed to echo to his footsteps as if never had happy people run through the little house; the stairs creaked under his tread, which had grown sluggish with age in the lapse of the last hour. As he climbed the stairway he looked back at the front door. A door had closed in his face. But it was the door to a man’s life, and it had closed him in, on the wrong side for youth and happiness and on the side with creeping disillusion--the death of dreams.