ourse, and it was particularly terrible to
them, because neither I nor their mother were to go with them. But I
was anxious they should go: there is nothing better for children than
occasionally to visit a strange house, and to go by themselves without
an elder person to depend upon. It gives them independence and gets rid
of shyness. They end by enjoying themselves immensely, and perhaps
making some romantic friendship. As a child, I was almost tearfully
insistent that I should not have to go on such visits; but yet a few
days of the sort stand out in my childhood with a vividness and a
distinctness, which show what an effect they produced, and how they
quickened one's perceptive and inventive faculties.

When they were gone I went out with Maud. I was at my very worst, I
fear; full of heaviness and deeply disquieted; desiring I knew well
what--some quickening of emotion, some hopeful impulse--but utterly
unable to attain it. We had a very sad talk. I tried to make it clear
to her how desolate I felt, and to win some kind of forgiveness for my
sterile and loveless mood. She tried to comfort me; she said that it
was only like passing through a tunnel; she made it clear to me, by
some unspoken communication, that I was dearer than ever to her in
these days of sorrow; but there was a shadow in her mind, the shadow
that fell from the loneliness in which I moved, the sense that she
could not share my misery with me. I tried to show her that the one
thing one could not share was emptiness. If one's cup is full of
interests, plans, happinesses, even tangible anxieties, it is easy and
natural to make them known to one whom one loves best. But one cannot
share the horror of the formless dark; the vacuous and tortured mind.
It is the dark absence of anything that is the source of my
wretchedness. If there were pain, grief, mournful energy of any kind,
one could put it into words; but how can one find expression for what
is a total eclipse?

It was not, I said, that anything had come between her and me; but I
seemed to be remote, withdrawn, laid apart like some stiffening corpse
in the tomb. She tried to reassure me, to show me that it was mainly
physical, the overstrain of long and actively enjoyed work, and that
all I needed was rest. She did not say one word of reproach, or
anything to imply that I was unmanly and cowardly--indeed, she
contrived, I know not how, to lead me to think that my state was in
ordinary life hardly a