He had gone to bed miserable; he had passed a night of misery, and he had waked up more miserable than ever. He had been like that for three days and three nights straight on end, and no wonder. It wasn’t only that his young wife Elizabeth had run away with Paul Jeffreson, the Imagist poet. Besides the frailty of Elizabeth, he had discovered a fatal flaw in his own system of metaphysics. His belief in Elizabeth was gone. So was his belief in the Absolute. The two things had come at once, to crush him. And he had to own bitterly that they were not altogether unrelated. “If,” Mr. Spalding said to himself, “I had served my wife as faithfully as I have served my God, she would not now have deserted me for Paul Jeffreson.” He meant that if he had not been wrapped up in his system of metaphysics, Elizabeth might still have been wrapped up in him. He had nobody but himself to thank for her behaviour. If she had run away with anybody else, since run she must, he might have forgiven her; he might have forgiven himself; but there could be nothing but misery in store for Elizabeth. Paul Jeffreson had genius, Mr. Spalding didn’t deny it; immortal genius; but he had no morals; he drank; he drugged; in Mr. Spalding’s decent phrase, he did everything he shouldn’t do. You would have thought this overwhelming disaster would have completely outweighed the other trouble. But no; Mr. Spalding had a balanced mind; he mourned with equal sorrow the loss of his wife and the loss of his Absolute. A flaw in a metaphysical system may seem to you a small thing; but you must bear in mind that, ever since he could think at all, Mr. Spalding had been devoured by a hunger and thirst after metaphysical truth. He had flung over the God he had been taught to believe in because, besides being an outrage to Mr. Spalding’s moral sense, he wasn’t metaphysical enough. The poor man was always worrying about metaphysics; he wandered from system to system, seeking truth, seeking reality, seeking some supreme intellectual satisfaction that never came. He thought he had found it in his theory of Absolute Pantheism. But really, Spalding’s Pantheism, anybody’s Pantheism for that matter, couldn’t, when you brought it down to bed-rock thinking, hold water for a minute. And the more Absolute he made it, the leakier it was.