He sat up in bed, his temples throbbing, his face flushed and damp. He pushed his hair back from his forehead, and stared out at the morning with eyes that burned. He fully remembered all that had happened, without such reminders as his headache, his sickness, and the rumpled clothes in which he had slept all night. His brain throbbed to the point of torture. Sharp cuts of pain tore through it, hideous revisualisations seemed to scorch whole surfaces of it with sudden flames. Facts hammered at it with monotonous mercilessness. He fell back on the pillow, and for some minutes lay quite still, staring out at the woods. There they lay in their straight brown line, those woods. He could almost hear the rock of the wind in them, creeping to him over the stillness of the fields. They seemed to whisper peace--peace to his throbbing pulses and burning skin and aching body and breaking heart. All his universe was shattered, except those quiet external things--the woods and fields round his home. They stood unchanged through all his turmoils, they responded only to their own remote influences--the warming and cooling of winds, the waxing and waning of the sun's heat, the frostiness of vapours. He might rage, despair, scream, and curse in them without changing the colour of one leaf. He longed stupidly for tears, but those easy tears of his humiliation would not come. He felt that if he thought of Len and Janey he might cry. But he would not think of them, though in his heart was an infinite tenderness. Len and Janey were like the woods, they did not change--then suddenly he realised that nothing had changed, it was only he. He had changed, and could not fit in with his old environment. Curse it! Damn it! Where could he find peace? Perhaps he had formally renounced peace on that day he plunged his hands into the pitchy mess of money-making. He had known peace before then--soft dreams that flew to him from the lattices of dawn. He remembered days when he had lain in the corner of some field, among the rustling hay-grass, his soul lost in the eternities of peace within it. But now--he had renounced peace. He had turned from pure things to defiled--and he had sharpened his brain, whetted it on artificialities. For the man with brains there is seldom peace, but an eternal questing. The man without brains suffers only the problem of "what?" It is the man with brains who has to face the seven-times hotter problem of "why?"