Lewis awoke to a sense, no longer of a world enhanced, and made infinitely sweeter and fairer, by the presence in it of a creature more beautiful and delightful than he had ever before dreamt of, but of a universe which had gone suddenly out of joint, where the possibilities of blessedness were counteracted by malign influences, and fate took pleasure in turning happiness into trouble: one way and another the calmly smiling day, the happy commonplace, the matter-of-course existence had come to an end for him. It was very summary and very complete. He looked back for a few days, and thought how easily he had made up his mind about Miss Jean, how calmly he had determined to make her a present of his existence, with a kind of horror. In reality it had been a very small part of his existence which he had resolved to give up to her: but this he did not recollect in the excitement of his thoughts. He had meant to live as he pleased, always returning between whiles to the kind, elderly, indulgent wife who, he felt sure, would require no more of him; but this now seemed a sort of blasphemy to him, a travesty of the life which a man should wish to live with the true mate and companion who would share his every thought. He rejected his former thoughts with a self-disgust that was full of anger. It was odious to him to know that he had been capable of so thinking. All that had altered in a moment; not with the first sight of love, and what it was, in the person of Lilias, but with the first clear perception that this fair creature was some one's destined bride, but not his. In the irony of fate not his; revealed to him only after it was too late, after he had mortgaged his existence and bound himself to a world so much pettier and poorer than that of which she held the key.