His marriage⁠ ⁠… as gratuitous as the disillusion of it and the smell of his wife’s breath and the sensuality, the hypocrisy! And that deadly official life, and anxiety about money, and so for one year, and two, and ten, and twenty, and always the same thing. And the further he went, the more deadly it became. “As though I had been going steadily downhill, imagining that I was going uphill. So it was in fact. In public opinion I was going uphill, and steadily as I got up it life was ebbing away from me.⁠ ⁠… And now the work’s done, there’s only to die.”

“But what is this? What for? It cannot be! It cannot be that life has been so senseless, so loathsome? And if it really was so loathsome and senseless, then why die, and die in agony? There’s something wrong.”

“Can it be I have not lived as one ought?” suddenly came into his head. “But how not so, when I’ve done everything as it should be done?” he said, and at once dismissed this only solution of all the enigma of life and death as something utterly out of the question.