At night, after the whist-party had dispersed, he pretended that he had papers to look into and sent Jessie to bed. He sat by the fire staring into the glowing coals. It died down, but he made no effort to keep it alight. He was exhausted. The assumed hilarity of the evening had been too great a strain, and yet not strain enough. He was driving himself to a collapse, but was fearful lest it should come too soon. It was very cold. He shivered and crouched over the black grate. He heard his wife's voice calling him: "Aren't you coming up to-night?" "Presently . . . presently." When he judged that she would be asleep he crept upstairs, and in the dark, to avoid waking her and also to avoid seeing her, he slipped into the bed by her side. All night he lay awake, cold, throbbing, straining and starting at all the small noises of the house. At breakfast he chattered gaily over the newspapers. There was a school board election toward, and a woman had offered herself as a candidate for their division. He chaffed Jessie and said he supposed she would soon be wanting to vote for Parliament. Jessie was to spend the day in town shopping with her mother. He asked her to make sundry small purchases for him, and they agreed that they would have a crab for supper. He was rather a long time packing the little handbag he always took with him to town. She went to remind him that it was getting late and found him with his hand in a drawer. He shut it hastily and asked her to fetch his tobacco-pouch from upstairs. When she came down again he was waiting for her at the front door. She walked to the little iron gate with him and they kissed. As he reached the kerb he turned to look at her and saw the old ladies and gentlemen at their windows, and he felt with a twinge of shame that for years he had been a spectacle without knowing it. . . . He thought Jessie looked rather ill, tired, old, and bony. It was absurd for them to kiss in public. . . . Everything seemed absurd, fantastical, and unreal. The world was presented to his eyes in sharper outline than he had ever seen it before. It was bathed in a cold grey light. It had nothing to do with him. It was going on. He felt stationary. That his body was moving was nothing. His thoughts were not moving. Everything was absurd. The new sharply outlined world, with its curious interwoven activities (he saw how they were dovetailed), was moving on. The world with which he had been concerned--the world in which he had been miserable, elated, crestfallen, amused, disgusted--the world in which he had known affection and companionship and spite and jealousy--was moving backward, sinking from under his feet while he himself stood on the verge of a nonsensical dawn that had its light from a setting sun. Away from him, backward and forward, everything moved faster and faster, making him dizzy, intolerably dizzy, sick and cold with it.