One of them was that he should have caught himself--for he HAD so done--REALLY wondering if the great accident would take form now as nothing more than his being condemned to see this charming woman, this admirable friend, pass away from him.He had never so unreservedly qualified her as while confronted in thought with such a possibility; in spite of which there was small doubt for him that as an answer to his long riddle the mere effacement of even so fine a feature of his situation would be an abject anticlimax.It would represent, as connected with his past attitude, a drop of dignity under the shadow of which his existence could only become the most grotesques of failures.He had been far from holding it a failure--long as he had waited for the appearance that was to make it a success.He had waited for quite another thing, not for such a thing as that.The breath of his good faith came short, however, as he recognised how long he had waited, or how long at least his companion had.That she, at all events, might be recorded as having waited in vain--this affected him sharply, and all the more because of his it first having done little more than amuse himself with the idea.It grew more grave as the gravity of her condition grew, and the state of mind it produced in him, which he himself ended by watching as if it had been some definite disfigurement of his outer person, may pass for another of his surprises.This conjoined itself still with another, the really stupefying consciousness of a question that he would have allowed to shape itself had he dared.What did everything mean--what, that is, did SHE mean, she and her vain waiting and her probable death and the soundless admonition of it all--unless that, at this time of day, it was simply, it was overwhelmingly too late? He had never at any stage of his queer consciousness admitted the whisper of such a correction; he had never till within these last few months been so false to his conviction as not to hold that what was to come to him had time, whether HE struck himself as having it or not.That at last, at last, he certainly hadn't it, to speak of, or had it but in the scantiest measure--such, soon enough, as things went with him, became the inference with which his old obsession had to reckon: and this it was not helped to do by the more and more confirmed appearance that the great vagueness casting the long shadow in which he had lived had, to attest 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."
