He had come to loathe every aspect of that chair and desk which made up his spiritual scaffold. There he talked and fidgeted while those rows of cropped heads and protruding ears nodded and swayed like shocks of ruffled wheat under the conscientious, pitiless repetition of a recurrent winnowing. And this was destined to be his life indefinitely, sans the remotest chance of a change for the better, unless his mother, as a successful businesswoman, gave him a pension!

What a mess he had made of his life! As he surveyed those spots and blurs and marks on these odious walls, he began to recognize the fact that until the last two or three days he had never faced reality at all. His heavenly vice, hugged to himself like a fairy bride, had protected him from reality. Here he was, thirty-six years old, and as far as real reality was concerned⁠—the reality his mother lived in, the reality Darnley lived in⁠—he was as innocent and preoccupied as a hermit who reads nothing but his breviary.