into that house! I might
have to fly ignominiously before long, to practise elaborate falsehood,
to disappear.

'Perhaps you are right,' I agreed.

The conversation grew fragmentary, and less and less formal. Mrs.
Ispenlove was the chief talker. I remember she said that she was always
being thrown among clever people, people who could do things, and that
her own inability to do anything at all was getting to be an obsession
with her; and that people like me could have no idea of the tortures of
self-depreciation which she suffered. Her voice was strangely wistful
during this confession. She also spoke--once only, and quite shortly,
but with what naive enthusiasm!--of the high mission and influence of the
novelist who wrote purely and conscientiously. After this, though my
liking for her was undiminished, I had summed her up. Mr. Ispenlove
offered no commentary on his wife's sentiments. He struck me as being a
reserved man, whose inner life was intense and sufficient to him.

'Ah!' I reflected, as Mrs. Ispenlove, with an almost motherly accent,
urged me to have another cup of tea, 'if you knew me, if you knew me,
what would you say to me? Would your charity be strong enough to overcome
your instincts?' And as I had felt older than my aunt, so I felt older
than Mrs. Ispenlove.

I left, but I had to promise to come again on the morrow, after I had
seen Mr. Ispenlove on business. The publisher took me down to my hotel in
the brougham (and I thought of the drive with Diaz, but the water was not
streaming down the windows), and then he returned to his office.

Without troubling to turn on the light in my bedroom, I sank sighing on
to the bed. The events of the afternoon had roused me from my terrible
lethargy, but now it overcame me again. I tried to think clearly about
the Ispenloves and what the new acquaintance meant for me; but I could
not think clearly. I had not been able to think clearly for two months. I
wished only to die. For a moment I meditated vaguely on suicide, but
suicide seemed to involve an amount of complicated enterprise far beyond
my capacity. It amazed me how I had managed to reach London. I must have
come mechanically, in a heavy dream; for I had no hope, no energy, no
vivacity, no interest. For many weeks my mind had revolved round an awful
possibility, as if hypnotized by it, and that monotonous revolution
seemed alone to constitute my real life. Moreover, I was subject to
recurring nausea, and