Perhaps never in his life had Wolf’s mind moved as rapidly as it moved now. His consciousness at this moment became like a wild horse stung by a gadfly or like an ox driven crazy by the eating of some “insane root.” Those words of hers, “Father is going to stay the night there,” took to themselves a sweet-shivering identity of their own. But his cheeks were flushed with a queer sense of discord within himself. “What I feel now,” he thought, “is not happiness at all. What is it? ” And then, as the two of them moved away over the wet sods of earth to the alley’s entrance: “That green moss⁠ ⁠… that green seaweed⁠ ⁠… was happiness; but this is something else. This is something that will kill my ‘mythology’ if I let it.”

He was taking her hand now to say goodbye. “What does she care,” he thought, “about my doing Urquhart’s book?” And there came over him, as he looked into her brown eyes, a cold shudder of deadly loneliness. “She would never understand,” he thought, “what I am risking by going back to Urquhart.”