ONE:He sat there, alone in the darkening room, doing nothing as far as definite effort went, and yet conscious of an intense internal activity in just looking at the myriads of images that this magic lantern of the mind presented to him. Now for a little it seemed to him that he contemplated a series of pictures that concerned the life which had once been his, and was now finished and rolled up, done with for ever. Now again for a little it seemed that all that was thus presented to him was the life that was going to be his, until for him all life was over. Alice would always be sewing slippers, his wife would always be ordering a bit of salmon, he would always be sitting in an empty office. For a few weeks there had passed across those eternal reiterations somebody whose very face he could not now recall, and when he tried to imagine her, he could see nothing but a blank, a black strip where words had been erased. To-morrow by this time he would know which of those two aspects was the true one: either the salmon and the slippers and this lonely meditation would be his no longer, or they would be all that he could call his. He felt, too, that it was already settled which it was to be: fate had already written in the inexorable book, and had closed it again. To-morrow the page would be shown him, he would read what was inscribed there. No effort on his part, no imposition of his will, no power of his to organise and build up would alter it. Though{304} the crisis was yet to come, its issue was already determined.

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