He moved restlessly about his rooms all day, chafed and fretted, and, when the twilight fell, he as aimlessly fidgeted out into the dusk and betook himself to the streets of Paris.
And as he strode moodily along, nagging whispers went with him—unpleasant questionings nudged at his elbow—irking discomfort plucked at his sleeve.
He had very clearly realized during the last few days that, good fellows as they were, Horace and his companions were all taken up with their own affairs—that they were really only genially interested in him in relation to themselves—that he was interested in them in relation to himself. Not a soul had asked a word about Betty. He resented it—yet he knew that his neglect of her alone had been the beginning of her being set aside from their ken. If he felt so of a sudden about their neglect of her, what must she have felt about his neglect of her? God, how he had let her drop out of everything!
He knew now that his one selfless friend had been this girl—this handsome dainty woman. And he had let her go out into the dusk, alone—leaving him alone.
And for what?
He laughed bitterly.
It came to him now, a whisper in his ear, that her brain was worth all the wits of all these others put together. It was revealed to him that most of the keenly observant, large, and humane phrases that had sounded the music of well-spoken insight to his understanding had been hers.
Of a sudden he realized what an appalling obstacle his indifference to her confidences about her work must have been! Indifference? Nay, he had shown a harsher snarl than that. What a chill to her enthusiasms and to the practice of her craft must have been all his silent discouragement—or lack of encouragement.... Stay—had it even been silent? There had been his ill-concealed impatience with the patience of her building. Had there not indeed been hints without disguise about her work being long enough in the doing? He could have cut out his tongue for its jeer about priggish dilatoriness and Casauban’s Key to all the Mythologies. His ill-manners and his neglect struck him in the face, and he shrank from it now with a burning sense of shame—his face scalded. What would he not have given to recall the shabby jibe!
He turned into a café and was greeted with a shout. And in the resulting rolic, for several hours, he forgot his self-recriminations. But in the black night, taking himself homewards, it struck him like a buffet upon the mouth delivered out of the surrounding darkness. He had lacked manhood.
Reaching his rooms, a dozen petty discomforts assailed him to remind him of the mother-care and gentle hands that no longer showed their tenderness—on striking a light, the stealthy shadows stole away skulkingly into the corners, mocking at his loneliness, nudging elbows at him.