"Not at all, old man--sorrow is a commonplace. The question is, what are we to make of the commonplace--a pageant or a joke? I'm not sure that Offenbach hasn't given a better answer than Beethoven." III In a small room in Gower Street a man lay on his bed, his face crammed into the pillow, his shoulders high against his ears, his legs twisted in a rigid lock of endurance. Now and then a shudder went through him, but it was the shudder of something taut and stiff, over which the merest surface tremble can pass. In his hand he crushed a letter. Behind his teeth words were forming, and fighting through to his colourless lips. "Janey!--my Janey! Oh, my God! I can't bear this." He suddenly twisted himself round on to his back, and faced the aching, yellow square of the window, where a May day was mocked by rain. There was a pipe close to the window, and the water poured from it in a quick tinkling trickle, cheering in rhythm, tragic in tone. Quentin unfolded Janey's letter. He read it--but that word is inadequate, for he read it in the same spirit as an Egyptian priest might read the glyphs of his divinity, seeing in each sign a volume of esoteric meaning, so that every jot and tittle was worthy of long minutes' contemplation. It was some time since Janey's letters had ceased to be for Quentin what she hoped. Literally they were rather bald and laboured, for Janey was no penwoman, but she put a wealth of thought and passion into the straggling lines, and for a long while he had seen this. But now he saw much more, she would have trembled to think of the meaning he read into her words--he tested each phrase for the insincerity he felt sure it must conceal, he hunted up and down the pages for that monster unknown to Janet, the _arrière pensée_. Her letters were a torture to him--they tortured his brain with shadows and seekings, they tortured his heart with blue fires of misgiving and scorchings of jealousy. She did not write oftener than once a week, but the torment of a single letter lasted till its successor at once varied and renewed it. Lying there in the hideous dusk of what should have been a summer afternoon, Quentin wondered if the doom of love and lovers had not been spoken him--"thou canst not see My Face and live." It was a vital fear. Before he had brought his love to its consummation, snatched the veil from its mysteries, and looked it in the face, it had, in spite of hours of anguish, been his comfort, the strongest, tenderest, purest thing in his life. But now he saw, without much searching, that this love, though deeper and fiercer than ever, belonged somehow to his lower self. To realise it brought despair instead of comfort, wreckage instead of calm. He dared not, as in former days, plunge his sick heart into it as into a spring of healing waters--rather it was a scalding fountain, bubbling and seething out of death.