It was Sunday night; and on Sunday night, even
within the hushed precincts of the Temple, one is conscious of a
deeper hush.
When he had lighted the lamp in his sitting-room, he let himself drop
into an armchair before the empty fireplace. He was tired, he was
exhausted. Yet nothing had happened to tire him. He had dined, as he
always dined on Sundays, with the Rodericks, in Cheyne Walk; he had
driven home in a hansom. There was no reason why he should be tired.
But he was tired. A deadly lassitude penetrated his body and his
spirit, like a fluid. He was too tired to go to bed.
'I suppose I am getting old,' he thought.
To a second person the matter would have appeared not one of
supposition but of certainty, not of progression but of
accomplishment. Getting old indeed? But he _was_ old. It was an old
man, grey and wrinkled and wasted, who sat there, limp, sunken upon
himself, in his easy-chair. In years, to be sure, he was under sixty;
but he looked like a man of seventy-five.
'I am getting old, I suppose I am getting old.'
And vaguely, dully, he contemplated his life, spread out behind him
like a misty landscape, and thought what a failure it had been. What
had it come to? What had it brought him? What had he done or won?
Nothing, nothing. It had brought him nothing but old age, solitude,
disappointment, and, to-night especially, a sense of fatigue and
apathy that weighed upon him like a suffocating blanket.
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