It seemed to him as he
looked back that their happiness had never been so great as his pain
was now. There had always been something imperfect in their happiness,
something they had wanted and had not been able to get. It had been
fragmentary and incomplete, because they were so young and had not known
what they were doing.
The light of his candle flickered over the boughs of a tree outside the
window, and as the branch swayed in the darkness there came before his
mind a picture of all the world that lay outside his window; he thought
of the immense river and the immense forest, the vast stretches of dry
earth and the plains of the sea that encircled the earth; from the sea
the sky rose steep and enormous, and the air washed profoundly between
the sky and the sea. How vast and dark it must be tonight, lying exposed
to the wind; and in all this great space it was curious to think how
few the towns were, and how small little rings of light, or single
glow-worms he figured them, scattered here and there, among the swelling
uncultivated folds of the world. And in those towns were little men and
women, tiny men and women. Oh, it was absurd, when one thought of it,
to sit here in a little room suffering and caring. What did anything
matter? Rachel, a tiny creature, lay ill beneath him, and here in his
little room he suffered on her account.
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