It was always the other self that felt at such moments. He could
abstract himself from it, and feel that he was watching it; he could
direct it and make it do what he pleased; but he could neither control
its thoughts nor feel any sympathy for them. Until the fatal day, the
world had all been black to him; only by closing his eyes could he bring
into it the light that hovered about a dead woman's face.

But now the black was changed to a flat and toneless white in which
there was never the least variation. Life was to him a vast blank, in
which, without interest or sensation, he moved in any direction he
pleased, and he pleased that it should be always the same direction,
from the remembrance of a previous intention and abiding principle. But
it might as well have been any other, backwards, or to right or left. It
was all precisely the same, and it was perfectly inconceivable to him
that he should ever care whether in the endless journey he ever came
upon a spot or point in the blank waste which should prove to him that
he had moved at all. Nothing could make any difference. He was beyond
that state in which any difference was apprehensible between one thing
and another.

His double had material wants, and was ruled by material circumstances.
His double was a broken-hearted creature, toiling to make money for a
little child to which it felt itself bound by every responsibility which
can bind father to son; acknowledging the indebtedness in every act of
its laborious life, denying itself every luxury, and almost every
comfort, that there might be a little more for the child, now and in
time to come; weary beyond earthly weariness, but untiring in the
mechanical performance of its set task; fatally strong and destined,
perhaps, to live on through sixty or seventy years of the same unceasing
toil; fatally weak in its one deep wound, and horribly sensitive within
itself, but outwardly expressionless, strong, merely a little more pale
and haggard than Paul Griggs had been.

This was the being whom Paul Griggs employed, as it were, to work for
him, which he thoroughly understood and could control in every part
except in its thoughts, and they were its own. But he himself existed in
another sphere, in which there were neither interests nor
responsibilities, nor landmarks, nor touches of human feeling, neither
memories for the dead nor hopes for the living; in which everything was
the same, because there was nothing but a