“No,” said Marley, “thank you. I’ve just been feeling a little bit blue, that’s all.”
“What about?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’m kind o’ discouraged. It seems to me that I’m wasting time; I’m not making any headway and then everybody in town is—”
“I wouldn’t mind that,” said Powell, divining the trouble at once. “They’ve had me on the gridiron for about forty years, and they never get tired of giving it a twist. It doesn’t bother me much any more, and I don’t see why you should let it bother you, especially as all they say about you is a damn lie.”
The speech touched Marley, and he lost himself in an impulse of sympathy for Powell, but he could not put his sympathy before Powell in the way he would like and his mind soon returned to himself.
“I’ve got to do something,” he said. “I wish I knew what.”
“Well,” said Powell, “you know what I’ve always told you. I know what I’d do if I were your age. Of course—”
Powell did not finish his sentence. He was looking out the window again, lost in introspection.
Powell’s reiteration of his old advice expressed the very thought that had been nebulous in Marley’s mind for days, and while he was conscious of it, he feared the consciousness, and struggled to prevent it from positing itself. But now that Powell had voiced it for him, he could escape it no longer, and it filled him with a fear. He went about all the day with this fear appalling him; more and more under its perverse influence he felt himself an alien, and the people he met in the street seemed unreal and strange, outlandish persons whom he had never known. They came upon him as ghosts, or if they did something to prove their reality, he seemed to be some ghost himself.
In the afternoon he received a note from Lavinia; she said that she was going that evening with George Halliday to a concert in the Opera House. She did not want to go a bit, she said, but her mother, and especially her father, had urged her to go; arguing that she now went out so seldom that it must do her good, and besides, they had urged her so often that she felt it to be her duty in this instance; she had held out as long as she could, and then had yielded.