Like a drop of ice-cold rain, frozen, accursed, timeless, this abominable doubt fell upon his heart and sank into its depths. The whole subterranean stream of Wolf’s life-illusion had been obsessed, as long as he could remember, by the notion of himself as some kind of a protagonist in a cosmic struggle. He hated the traditional terminology for this primordial dualism; and it was out of his hatred of this, and out of his furtive pride, that he always opposed, in his dialogues with himself, his own secret “mythology” to some equally secret “evil” in the world around him. But because the pressure of circumstances had made him so dependent on Mr. Urquhart’s money, it happened that until this actual moment he had evaded bringing his conscience to bear upon the man’s book, though he had brought it to bear freely enough upon the man himself.

But now⁠—cold, frozen, eternal, malignant⁠—this abominable doubt fell upon him like an accursed rain⁠ ⁠… drip-drop, drip-drop, drip-drop⁠ ⁠… each drop sinking out of sight into the dim, unreasoning levels of his being, where it began poisoning the waters.