He was no happier than before.
He could decide that he would have anything he chose
to name--and it would in no whit lighten his mood.
The yacht might be as grand as High Thorpe, and relatively
as spacious and well ordered, but would he not grow as tired
of the one as he had of the other?
He stopped short at this blunt self-expression of something
he had never admitted to himself. Was he indeed
tired of High Thorpe? He had assured his wife to the
contrary yesterday. He reiterated the assurance to his own
mind now. It was instead that he was tired of himself.
He carried a weariness about with him, which looked at
everything with apathetic eyes, and cared for nothing.
Some nameless paralysis had settled upon his capacity
for amusement and enjoyment, and atrophied it.
He had had the power to expand his life to the farthest
boundaries of rich experience and sensation, and he had
deliberately shrunk into a sort of herbaceous nonentity,
whom nobody knew or cared about. He might have had London
at his beck and call, and yet of all that the metropolis
might mean to a millionaire, he had been able to think
of nothing better than that it should send old Kervick
to him, to help beguile his boredom with dominoes
and mess-room stories! Pah! He was disgusted with himself.
Striking out a new course, with the Monument as his guide,
he presently came into a part of the City which had a certain
familiarity for him.
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