THE END


He knew that nothing could ever possibly happen to him again and so he
sat on his sofa waiting--for death, he supposed, having excluded every
other possibility. He didn't want to die, he didn't want to do anything,
to eat or drink or feel or think--above all, he didn't want to move. He
had shut his eyes trying to shut out the room. Every bit of it was
saturated in her, everything had been consecrated--contaminated, it
seemed to him now--by her touch. There wasn't a patch of carpet or
chintz that didn't belong to her intimately and exclusively. Every
object in the room seemed to pose her and add to the interminable
picture gallery of his memory. He opened his eyes and saw an uncut
pencil. Here, at any rate, was something new and independent--neutral
territory, unsharpened it was an unloaded pistol and he wanted to shoot.
At her? He was bound to miss. His bitterness was no medium through which
to recapture her magic and without it he would merely be forcing a lay
figure to perform vulgar and meaningless antics. And if he tore her to
bits, it would be an indictment of himself, not of his gentlemanliness,
that had long ceased to mean anything to him--but of his taste. Wearily,
he shut his eyes. It was no good thinking when your mind had become a
circle--a very small circle. He remembered something she had once said,
"The future looks like the present, stretching interminably ahead in the
shadow of the past." She had always understood everything, so she didn't
deserve to be forgiven anything.

The front door bell rang and at once, he felt sick and faint. A ring
still excited him as much as it had done in the days when it might have
been hers. It was a ridiculous state of nerves that he had never been