Every detail
pressed itself on his notice with the familiarity of an
accidental confidant: whichever way he turned, he felt the
nudge of a transient intimacy...
The one fixed point in his immediate future was that his
leave was over and that he must be back at his post in
London the next morning. Within twenty-four hours he would
again be in a daylight world of recognized activities,
himself a busy, responsible, relatively necessary factor in
the big whirring social and official machine. That fixed
obligation was the fact he could think of with the least
discomfort, yet for some unaccountable reason it was the one
on which he found it most difficult to fix his thoughts.
Whenever he did so, the room jerked him back into the circle
of its insistent associations. It was extraordinary with
what a microscopic minuteness of loathing he hated it all:
the grimy carpet and wallpaper, the black marble mantel-
piece, the clock with a gilt allegory under a dusty bell,
the high-bolstered brown-counterpaned bed, the framed card
of printed rules under the electric light switch, and the
door of communication with the next room. He hated the door
most of all...
At the outset, he had felt no special sense of
responsibility. He was satisfied that he had struck the
right note, and convinced of his power of sustaining it.
The whole incident had somehow seemed, in spite of its
vulgar setting and its inevitable prosaic propinquities, to
be enacting itself in some unmapped region outside the pale
of the usual.
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