At last he was wholly alone with his own thoughts, as he
desired. From the moment Jim had read him the wires, which were the real
revelation of the situation to which he had come, he had been travelling
hard on the road leading to a cul-de-sac, from which there was no egress
save by breaking through the wall. Never, it might have seemed, had his
mind been clearer, but it was a clearness belonging to the abnormal. It
was a straight line of thought which, in its intensity, gathered all
other thoughts into its wake, reduced them to the control of an
obsession. It was borne in on his mind that his day was done, that
nothing could right the disorder which had strewn his path with broken
hopes and shattered ambitions. No life-work left, no schemes to
accomplish, no construction to achieve, no wealth to gain, no public good
to be won, no home to be his, no woman, his very own, to be his
counsellor and guide in the natural way!
As myriad thoughts drove through his brain on this Indian-summer night,
they all merged into the one obsession that he could no longer stay. The
irresistible logic of the brain stretched to an abnormal tenuity, and an
intolerable brightness was with him. He was in the throes of that intense
visualization which comes with insomnia, when one is awake yet apart from
the waking world, where nothing is really real and nothing normal.
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