Brookes finds his way down the stairs, through the unlighted hall, and lets himself out in the chill October air.
He goes down the street feeling a confused sense of having inflicted pain and left distress behind him, but his own sensation of irritation, his own vexation and angry resentment against his lot in life, all but obliterate it.
For some seconds he walks on with all his thoughts merged together in a mere desperate and painful confusion. "Only a hundred a year!" is his plainest, most bitter reflection. "Five-and-twenty, and only earning a hundred a year!"
Brookes is not of a calm temperament. His nervous system is tensely strung, and generally, owing to various incidental matters, slightly out of tune, or at anyrate, feels so.
His circulation is rapid, every pulse beats strongly, and the blood flows hotly in his veins.
His mental nature is of much the same order—passionate, excitable, and impatient; but there is such a heavy curb-rein of control perpetually upon it, that its three leading qualities jar inwardly upon himself more than they show to outsiders.
Even now the confused, excited disorder in his brain is soon regulated and calmed by his will, and as he walks on he lapses into trying to recollect whether he has said all he meant to.
He concludes that he has, and a certain satisfaction comes over him.
"Well, I have told her my views now," he reflects. "She sees what I think, and what my principles are. She won't wonder that I say nothing. I shall try for another post and a rise of salary, and then—"
Stephen's character was a fine one in its way. The capacity for self-command and self-denial was tremendous, his sense of honour keen, his adherence to that which he conceived the right inflexible, his will immutable; but of the subtler sweetness of the human heart he had none.