When his vanity was wounded he made a fetish of his isolation. He told himself that he had no place in the superficiality of modern life. He took a train away from the city and walked along the beach under the hot gray sky beneath clouds like glaring water. He wanted to avoid his artist friends. He wished to imagine that they could never understand him. He was acute in his perception of their weaknesses and was always defending himself inwardly against discovering their defects in himself.
He tired himself out and, taking off his coat, sat down on some driftwood to rest. His black hair clung in sweated curls to his flushed forehead. The pine boughs above him rocked secretly against the glowing blindness of the clouds. The bunches of needles, lustrous on the tips of the branches, were like black stars. The sea was a moving hill going up against the horizon. It made a slow heavy sound. The small waves sidled along the shore, opened their fluted edges a little, fan-wise, then flattened themselves and sank away with lisping noises.
Dudley was more and more depressed by the constant terrible fear of having made himself ludicrous. He said to himself that neither Julia nor her husband would understand him, and he must suffer the miscomprehension of his motives which would inevitably result from their lesser experience. The most disconcerting thing was the sudden retrospective vividness of his physical intimacy with Julia. She seemed to have become a part of all the abhorrent elements that were commonplace in his past, elements against which his romantic conception of his destiny led him to rebel.
His full lips pouted despairingly beneath his neat mustache shining in the glare, and there was an aggrieved expression in his small sparkling eyes. His plump, pretty body made him unhappy. He tried to exclude it. It was terrible for him to realize ugliness or physical deficiency of any sort. He never associated this with his weak childhood and the semi-invalidism which he but vaguely remembered. He had begun so early to detach his experiences from those of other beings, that it never occurred to him. Yet if he came in contact with disease in another creature it left him mentally ill. He never made any attempt to analyze the violence of his reaction against the sight of sickness. At any rate, his theory was of a Golden Age and a primitive man who had fallen through admitting weakness into his psychical life.
Dudley did not explain the fact to himself, but he knew that his dignity survived only in his capacity for pain of the spirit. When he was in agony of mind he never really doubted that his condition was a superior one, the travail in which the great soul gave birth to its perfection. At twenty-seven his hair was turning gray and there were lines of exhaustion and disillusionment about his eyes and mouth. He demanded so much of himself that it allowed him no spiritual quiet.
To avoid recognizing the platitudinous details of his love affairs he submitted himself to mystical tortures. He wanted to leave each incident of his existence finished and perfect as he passed through it. As much as he craved admiration, he needed gentleness, but he could not ask for it.
He remained on the beach until nightfall. He could not discover in himself enough grief to release him from the cold misery and absurdity of everyday human affairs.
Between Julia and Laurence, the reflex of their emotional fatigue expressed itself in a mutual inertia. Except that Laurence showed his desire to be alone by moving his bed into a small isolated room at the back of the house, nothing in the order of existence was changed.
Before the children, Julia spoke to him gently, almost pathetically, and only now and then dared look at his face. He tried to avoid her guilty and demanding gaze. If she caught his eyes he would glance quickly and defensively away with a contraction of his features that he could not control.