It was absurd. He felt as though a cannon-ball had gone through his abdomen. He sat there, weak, stunned, gasping for breath—with a mind curiously detached, floating somewhere above that stunned body, wondering.... It was curious that anything in the world could hurt so much.
Then, in a rush, all his energy seemed to come back, flooding and filling his body—as if to provide him the strength with which to return blow for blow. And that superfluity of strength was worse than the weakness had been—for there was no one, nothing to fight. Words out of the air had hurt him, and he could not fight back.
The emotion which flooded him ebbed at last, leaving him in a curious mood of utter coldness. The thought came into his mind: “Nothing that ever happens to me can hurt me after this—nothing.”
He opened the drawer. He wanted to see that unfinished novel. He wanted to know what it was really like. He felt capable of judging it calmly.
He turned the pages here and there, reading at random, now with affection and now with contempt, making up his mind.... He suddenly realized that he was feeling ashamed of it all. He did not realize that this new humiliation, at the hands of a girl, had awakened painful memories of the love-affair which he had celebrated in this novel, and which had ended so differently in real life from the way it was to end in this book; he only knew that he was ashamed.
The style, he said to himself, was bad—very bad.
He forced himself to read again the chapter which had caused all the trouble. It made him smile painfully. Why, this bald and painstaking frankness of his was not courageous, it was merely comic!... He turned the pages again. This stuff was not a novel.
He had been an idler, a dreamer, a fool....
And suddenly he remembered something—a scene from a long time ago: it was in school, and the principal was looking over a boy’s shoulder at a piece of paper upon which, day-dreaming of his future, the boy had written: “Felix Fay, the great novelist....”
He heard the principal telling that boy to write those words on the blackboard, to show the class what he had been doing instead of attending to his lessons. He saw the boy, pale and trembling, rise and face a hundred curious, staring eyes....