nsciousness as to exclude everything else.

At the time, somehow, he had made his terms with it; he had then more
urgent questions to meet than that of the poor creature's taste in
worrying pain; but actually it struck him--not the question, but the
fact itself of the taste--as the one thing left over from all that had
come and gone. So it was; nothing remained to him in the world, on the
bench of desolation, but the option of taking up that echo--together
with an abundance of free time for doing so. That he hadn't made sure of
what might and what mightn't have been done to him, that he had been
too afraid--had the proposition a possible bearing on his present
apprehension of things? To reply indeed he would have had to be able to
say what his present apprehension of things, left to itself, amounted
to; an uninspiring effort indeed he judged it, sunk to so poor a pitch
was his material of thought--though it might at last have been the feat
he sought to perform as he stared at the grey-green sea.

IV

It was seldom he was disturbed in any form of sequestered speculation,
or that at his times of predilection, especially that of the long autumn
blankness between the season of trippers and the season of Bath-chairs,
there were westward stragglers enough to jar upon his settled sense of
priority. For himself his seat, the term of his walk, was consecrated;
it had figured to him for years as the last (though there were others,
not immediately near it, and differently disposed, that might have
aspired to the title); so that he could invidiously distinguish as he
approached, make out from a distance any accident of occupation, and
never draw nearer while that unpleasantness lasted. What he disliked
was to compromise on his tradition, whether for a man, a woman or a
connoodling couple; it was to idiots of this last composition he most
objected, he having sat there, in the past, alone, having sat there
interminably with Nan, having sat there with--well, with other women
when women, at hours of ease, could still care or count for him, but
having never shared the place with any shuffling or snuffling stranger.
It was a world of fidgets and starts, however, the world of his present
dreariness--he alone possessed in it, he seemed to make out, of the
secret, of the dignity of sitting still with one's fate; so that if
he took a turn about or rested briefly elsewhere even foolish
philanderers--though this would never have been h