itself, almost no margin left. Since it was in
Time that he was to have met his fate, so it was in
Time that his fate was to have acted; and as he waked
up to the sense of no longer being young, which was
exactly the sense of being stale, just as that, in
turn, was the sense of being weak, he waked up to
another matter beside. It all hung together;
they were subject, he and the great vagueness, to
an equal and indivisible law. When the possibilities
themselves had accordingly turned stale, when the
secret of the gods had grown faint, had perhaps even
quite evaporated, that, and that only, was failure.
It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt,
dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not
to be anything. And so, in the dark valley into
which his path had taken its unlooked-for twist, he
wondered not a little as he groped. He didn’t
care what awful crash might overtake him, with what
ignominy or what monstrosity he might yet he associated—since
he wasn’t after all too utterly old to suffer—if
it would only be decently proportionate to the posture
he had kept, all his life, in the threatened presence
of it. He had but one desire left—that
he shouldn’t have been “sold.”
CHAPTER IV
Then it was that, one afternoon, while the spring
of the year was young and new she met all in her own
way his frankest betrayal of these alarms. He
had gone in late to see her, but evening hadn’t
settled and she was presented to him in that long
fresh light of waning April days which affects us
often with a sadness sharper than the greyest hours
of autumn. The week had been warm, the spring
was supposed to have begun early, and May Bartram
sat, for the first time in the year, without a fire;
a fact that, to Marcher’s sense, gave the scene
of which she formed part a smooth and ultimate look,
an air of knowing, in its immaculate order and cold
meaningless cheer, that it would never see a fire again.
Her own aspect—he could scarce have said
why—intensified this note. Almost
as white as wax, with the marks and signs in her face
as numerous and as fine as if they had been etched
by a needle, with soft white draperies relieved by
a faded green scarf on the delicate tone of which the
years had further refined, she was the picture of
a serene and exquisite but impenetrable sphinx, whose
head, or indeed all whose person, might have been
powdered with silver. She was a sphinx, yet with
her white petals and green fronds she might have been
a lily too—only an artificial lily, wonderfully
imitated and constantly kept, without dust or stain,
though not exempt from a slight droop and a complexity
of faint creases, under some clear glass bell.
The perfection of household care, of high polish
and finish, always reigned in her rooms, but they now
looked most as if everything had been wound up, tucked
in, put away, so that she might sit with folded hands
and with nothing more to do. She was “out
