"Why haven't I the pluck to take the plunge, instead of being the whining, drivelling idiot I am?" he cried. "Nothing cares, and nothing would happen—except nothingness."
He walked along the Embankment. "And yet I told her that I could be a man. After all, was she not right? What if she were unjust? Was such a creature as I am fit to be the husband of a pure woman? See the thing I have become in less than a month. Might I not, if I had married her, have become tired of my new rôle, and drifted? Well, if I had I should have dragged her with me. Did I really love her? Did I not love myself all the time? It was not of her I thought. It was all of my miserable, sordid little self. Still, if there is an Almighty, He made a mistake in treating me so! But there, as though an Almighty cared about such as I. If He does, He regards us all as a part of a grim joke."
"I'nt got a bit a bacca on yer, 'ave yer, guv'nor?"
A man rose from a seat as he spoke, and shivered. At the other end of the seat lay a woman asleep.
"I cawn't sleep, I'm so bloomin' cold," went on the man, "and I'm just dyin' for a bit a bacca."
"Why do you try to sleep here?" asked Leicester.
"'Cause I in't got no weers else, guv'nor. That's why. Besides, my hinsides is empty, and yer cawn't sleep when yer empty. Tell yer, I'm fair sick on it."
"Why don't you make an end of it?"
"Wot yer mean?"
Leicester pointed to the river.