After this there came the dull monotony of suffering—the life of routine, that death-in-life from which all possibility of action is gone, all power of choice, all changes and chances of the outer world cut off for ever—a life in which a man feels that he has suddenly dropped back into infancy, and is as helpless as a child upon his mother's knee. The child has all the unexplored future before him, the infinitive potentialities of life. The man turns his sad eyes backward and reviews the past. All the things he has done and the things he has left undone pass in a shadowy procession before his mind's eye. He sees how much wiser he might have been. The faults and follies of those departed years are unrolled before him as on a magic scroll. His maturer judgment, his colder blood, condemn the sins of his passionate youth.
Dora was her husband's companion through many an hour of gloom and depression. There were times when he would talk to her with a kind of feverish animation—talk of the books he had read, or of the men he had known—recall the memories of his youth—his boyhood even.
"I can only live in the past," he said, "and in your love. You are my present and my future, Dora. Were it not for you and your love I should have anticipated annihilation. The grave could hardly reduce me to more complete nothingness than this death-in-life here."
He looked round the room with an impatient sigh. And then, touched by the pathetic look in his wife's face, he added,
"Were it not for you, Dora. I have infinite riches while I possess your love. If I were to lose that now——"
"You know that you can never lose it. My love is a part of my life."
"Yes, but there might come a crushing blow that would kill it. Or if I were to sink into feebleness and imbecility—if the mind were to decay like the body——"
"The only difference would be to make me love you more fondly, knowing that you stood in greater need of my love," answered his wife quietly.
"Yes, I believe you are noble enough for the extremity of self-sacrifice," he said, gazing at her with a searching look, a look of the deepest love and keenest pain, a look that told of anguish surpassing the common woes of humanity. "Yes, I believe it is within the compass of a woman's nature to love a human wreck like me, or even to love a creature stained with blackest sin. There is no limit to the sublimity of a woman's love."
His wife was kneeling by his couch, her head leaning against his pillow. There were times when she could find no words of comfort, when she could only comfort him with the light touch of her lips upon his brow, her sympathy, her presence, her hand laid gently upon his.