He carried it home
with him, hugging it to his side with a kind of passion.
He had prized it, he prized it still, as his dearest treasure; the
looking-glass in which her face had been reflected a thousand times;
the glass that had contained her, known her; in which something of
herself, he felt, must linger. To handle it, look at it, into it,
behind it, was like holding a mystic communion with her; it gave him
an emotion that was infinitely sweet and bitter, a pain that was
dissolved in joy.
The glass lay now, folded in its ivory case, on the chimney-shelf in
front of him. That was its place; he always kept it on his
chimney-shelf, so that he could see it whenever he glanced round his
room. He leaned back in his chair, and looked at it; for a long time
his eyes remained fixed upon it. 'If she had married me, she wouldn't
have died. My love, my care, would have healed her. She could not have
died.' Monotonously, automatically, the phrase repeated itself over
and over again in his mind, while his eyes remained fixed on the ivory
case into which her looking-glass was folded. It was an effect of his
fatigue, no doubt, that his eyes, once directed upon an object, were
slow to leave it for another; that a phrase once pronounced in his
thought had this tendency to repeat itself over and over again.
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