At the outset, he had felt no special sense of
responsibility. He was satisfied that he had struck the
right note, and convinced of his power of sustaining it.
The whole incident had somehow seemed, in spite of its
vulgar setting and its inevitable prosaic propinquities, to
be enacting itself in some unmapped region outside the pale
of the usual. It was not like anything that had ever
happened to him before, or in which he had ever pictured
himself as likely to be involved; but that, at first, had
seemed no argument against his fitness to deal with it.

Perhaps but for the three days' rain he might have got away
without a doubt as to his adequacy. The rain had made all
the difference. It had thrown the whole picture out of
perspective, blotted out the mystery of the remoter planes
and the enchantment of the middle distance, and thrust into
prominence every commonplace fact of the foreground. It was
the kind of situation that was not helped by being thought
over; and by the perversity of circumstance he had been
forced into the unwilling contemplation of its every
aspect...

His cigar had gone out again, and he threw it into the fire
and vaguely meditated getting up to find another. But the
mere act of leaving his chair seemed to call for a greater
exertion of the will than he was capable of, and he leaned
his head back with closed eyes and listened to the drumming
of the rain.

A different noise aroused him. It was the opening and