I was thirty-two, now, and it seemed to me looking back, that I had never had one worthy ambition in all those years.  I had never even been seriously in love.  Most deplorable of all I had never looked forward to a future that promised anything but repetitions of the same success.

What had I to live for?  I saw before me a life of idleness with no decent occupation, no objects, but the amassing of more money, the seeking of a wider circle of acquaintances, dinner-parties at more select houses, an increasing reputation as a deviser of workmanlike, tolerably amusing plays.  If I had had vices such as a promiscuous love of women, I might have found the anticipation of such a future more tolerable.  There might, then, have been some incitement to new living, new experience.  But I had nothing.

Yet until that evening in the wood I had hardly paused to consider what would presently become of me.  The gradual increase in my scale of personal luxury had brought sufficient diversion and satisfaction.  I had lived in the pleasures of the moment, and had only rarely been conscious that those pleasures were growing stale; that the crust of life upon which I had so diligently crawled, was everywhere and always the same.

Now it was as if that monotonous surface had amazingly split.  My crawling was paralysed and changed to a terrified stillness.  I had paused, horrified, at the mouth of a pit, and gazed down with a sick loathing at the foundations of my life that had been so miraculously revealed.  I did, indeed, stand suddenly stock still in the wood, and staring down the darkening vista of the path, saw not the entranced twilight that was sinking the path in a pool of olive green shadows, but a kind of bioscopic presentation of my own futile, monotonous existence.

If Anne would have nothing to do with me, what, I asked myself, did the world hold that could conceivably make my life worth living?

I suppose most men and women have asked themselves the same question when they have been unexpectedly stirred by a great love.  The sense of unworthiness comes with a shock of surprise that seems violently to tear open the comfortable cloak of self-satisfaction.  I had been content with my life, even a little vain of my achievement, until that last conversation with Anne; now I loathed the thought of my own inefficiency and all my prospects of success appeared unendurably tame.  I was in the spiritual state of a religious convert, suddenly convinced of sin.

And yet somehow in the depths of my consciousness there was a sensible stir of resentment.  The artificial being I had created during my thirty-two years of life had an existence of its own and protested against this threat of instant annihilation.  I wanted to defend myself, and I was petulantly irritable because I could find no defence.