Oh, how he hated his work in that classroom! He did not only know in pitiless detail every map upon the wall⁠ ⁠… and feel toward it as something removed from every tincture of happiness⁠ ⁠… he also knew every ink-stain and fly-stain upon the wall. Those dirty marks were of equal importance with the maps. Both the marks and the maps represented a world that was totally bleak⁠ ⁠… a world of doleful invention, of disconsolate fancy⁠ ⁠… and yet a world in which he had to spend by far the larger part of his life.

He had just managed to cope with this desolate world by giving himself up to his secret vice the very second he left the school-gate. But those ecstatic sensations were now gone forever! He might tear his nerves to pieces with his effort to get those feelings back. They would never come back! They were lost. How did human beings go on living, when their life-illusion was destroyed? What did they tinker up and patch up inside of them to rub along with, to shuffle through life with, when they lacked that one grand resource?⁠ ⁠…