rything had come at once, as he would have said, everything had
changed. He had got in on Tuesday; he had spent Wednesday for the most
part down town, looking into the dismal subject of his anxiety--the
anxiety that, under a sudden decision, had brought him across the
unfriendly sea at mid-winter, and it was through information reaching
him on Wednesday evening that he had measured his loss, measured above
all his pain. These were two distinct things, he felt, and, though both
bad, one much worse than the other. It wasn't till the next three
days had pretty well ebbed, in fact, that he knew himself for so badly
wounded. He had waked up on Thursday morning, so far as he had slept at
all, with the sense, together, of a blinding New York blizzard and of a
deep sore inward ache. The great white savage storm would have kept him
at the best within doors, but his stricken state was by itself quite
reason enough.

He so felt the blow indeed, so gasped, before what had happened to him,
at the ugliness, the bitterness, and, beyond these things, the sinister
strangeness, that, the matter of his dismay little by little detaching
and projecting itself, settling there face to face with him as something
he must now live with always, he might have been in charge of some
horrid alien thing, some violent, scared, unhappy creature whom there
was small joy, of a truth, in remaining with, but whose behaviour
wouldn't perhaps bring him under notice, nor otherwise compromise him,
so long as he should stay to watch it. A young jibbering ape of one of
the more formidable sorts, or an ominous infant panther, smuggled into
the great gaudy hotel and whom it might yet be important he shouldn't
advertise, couldn't have affected him as needing more domestic
attention. The great gaudy hotel--The Pocahontas, but carried out
largely on "Du Barry" lines--made all about him, beside, behind, below,
above, in blocks and tiers and superpositions, a sufficient defensive
hugeness; so that, between the massive labyrinth and the New York
weather, life in a lighthouse during a gale would scarce have kept
him more apart. Even when in the course of that worse Thursday it
had occurred to him for vague relief that the odious certified facts
couldn't be all his misery, and that, with his throat and a probable
temperature, a brush of the epidemic, which was for ever brushing him,
accounted for something, even then he couldn't resign himself to bed and
broth and dimness