If his wife had then, on declaring to him her unfaithfulness, left him, he would have been wounded, unhappy, but he would not have been in the hopeless position⁠—incomprehensible to himself⁠—in which he felt himself now. He could not now reconcile his immediate past, his tenderness, his love for his sick wife, and for the other man’s child with what was now the case, that is with the fact that, as it were, in return for all this he now found himself alone, put to shame, a laughingstock, needed by no one, and despised by everyone.