He stiffened his muscles to quieten them.
“I’ve never been like this before. What is the matter?” he asked himself.
But the question died out immediately. It seemed useless and sickening to try and answer it. He began to cast about for an alleviation. If he could only do something, or have something he wanted, it would be better.
“What do I want?” he asked himself, and he anxiously strove to find this out.
Everything he suggested to himself made him sicken with weariness or distaste: the seaside, a foreign land, a fresh life that he had often dreamed of, farming in Canada.
“I should be just the same there,” he answered himself “Just the same sickening feeling there that I want nothing.”
“Helena!” he suggested to himself, trembling. But he only felt a deeper horror. The thought of her made him shrink convulsively.
“I can’t endure this,” he said. “If this is the case I had better be dead. To have no want, no desire—that is death, to begin with.”
He rested awhile after this. The idea of death alone seemed entertaining. Then “Is there really nothing I could turn to?” he asked himself.
To him, in that state of soul, it seemed there was not.
“Helena!” he suggested again, appealingly testing himself. “Ah, no!” he cried, drawing sharply back, as from an approaching touch upon a raw place.
He groaned slightly as he breathed, with a horrid weight of nausea. There was a fumbling upon the
