The Journal of a Disappointed Man

(3) Yet love and misery drove him towards it. So one day he closed his eyes and offered himself up with sacrificial hands.... "Too late," she said. "Once perhaps ... but now...." His eyes opened again, and in a second Love entered his Temple once more and finally ejected the money changers. (4) So they married after all, and he was under the impression she had made a good match. He had ill-health perhaps, yet who could doubt his ultimate fame? Then the War came, and he had the hardihood to open a sealed letter from his Doctor to the M.O. examining recruits.... Stars and staggers!! So it was she who was the victim in marriage! That harassing question: Did she know? What an ass he had been all through, what superlative egoism and superlative conceit! (5) Then a baby came. He broke under the strain and daily the symptoms grew more obvious. Did she know?... The question dazed him. Well, she did know, and had married him for love, nevertheless, against every friendly counsel, the Doctor's included. (6) And now the invalid's gratitude is almost cringeing, his admiration boundless and his love for always. It is the perfect rapprochement between two souls, one that was honeycombed with self-love and lost in the labyrinthine ways of his own motives and the other straight, direct, almost imperious in love and altogether adorable. Finis March 5. At home ill again. Yesterday was a day of utter dreariness. All my nerves were frozen, my heart congealed. I had no love for anyone ... no emotion of any sort. It was a catalepsy of the spirit harder to bear than fever or pain.... To-day, life is once more stirring in me, I am slowly awaking to the consciousness of acute but almost welcome misery.