Life was
barren to him, and would soon grow hateful; only in sleep could
he cast off the unchanging thoughts and desires which made all
else meaningless. And rightly meaningless: he revolted against
the unnatural constraints forbidding him to complete his manhood.
By what fatality was he alone of men withheld from the winning of
a woman's love?
He could not bear to walk the streets where the faces of
beautiful women would encounter him. When he must needs leave the
house, he went about in the poor, narrow ways, where only
spectacles of coarseness, and want, and toil would be presented
to him. Yet even here he was too often reminded that the
poverty-stricken of the class to which poverty is natural were
not condemned to endure in solitude. Only he who belonged to no
class, who was rejected alike by his fellows in privation and by
his equals in intellect, must die without having known the touch
of a loving woman's hand.
The summer went by, and he was unconscious of its warmth and
light. How his days passed he could not have said.
One evening in early autumn, as he stood before the book-stall at
the end of Goodge Street, a familiar voice accosted him.
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