the darkness within him. And he had not the
power, or the will, to seek it out and to know it. There it remained in
the darkness, the great pain, tearing him at times, and then being
silent. And when it tore him he crouched in silent subjection under it,
and when it left him alone again, he refused to know of it. It was
within the darkness, let it remain unknown. So he never admitted it,
except in a secret corner of himself, where all his never-revealed
fears and secrets were accumulated. For the rest, he had a pain, it
went away, it made no difference. It even stimulated him, excited him.

But it gradually absorbed his life. Gradually it drew away all his
potentiality, it bled him into the dark, it weaned him of life and drew
him away into the darkness. And in this twilight of his life little
remained visible to him. The business, his work, that was gone
entirely. His public interests had disappeared as if they had never
been. Even his family had become extraneous to him, he could only
remember, in some slight non-essential part of himself, that such and
such were his children. But it was historical fact, not vital to him.
He had to make an effort to know their relation to him. Even his wife
barely existed. She indeed was like the darkness, like the pain within
him. By some strange association, the darkness that contained the pain
and the darkness that contained his wife were identical. All his
thoughts and understandings became blurred and fused, and now his wife
and the consuming pain were the same dark secret power against him,
that he never faced. He never drove the dread out of its lair within
him. He only knew that there was a dark place, and something inhabiting
this darkness which issued from time to time and rent him. But he dared
not penetrate and drive the beast into the open. He had rather ignore
its existence. Only, in his vague way, the dread was his wife, the
destroyer, and it was the pain, the destruction, a darkness which was
one and both.

He very rarely saw his wife. She kept her room. Only occasionally she
came forth, with her head stretched forward, and in her low, possessed
voice, she asked him how he was. And he answered her, in the habit of
more than thirty years: 'Well, I don't think I'm any the worse, dear.'
But he was frightened of her, underneath this safeguard of habit,
frightened almost to the verge of death.

But all his life, he had been so constant to his lights, he had never
broken