Then he bought four stamps and sent it home.
He was a free man. He had three pounds fifteen in his pocket, a trifle
of money in the savings-bank, no situation, and a wife and son to
support. The position was serious enough, yet never for a moment could
he regard it without a new elasticity of spirit and a certain reckless
optimism, the source of which he did not in the least understand. He
was to learn before long, however, that moods and their resulting effect
upon the spirit were part of the penalty which he must pay for the
greater variety of his new life.
He took a tiny bedroom somewhere Westminster way--a room in a large,
solemn-looking house, decayed and shabby, but still showing traces of
its former splendor. That night he saw an Ibsen play from the front row
of a deserted gallery, and afterwards, in melancholy mood, he walked
homeward along the Embankment by the moonlight. For the first time in
life he had come face to face with a condition of which he had had no
previous experience--the condition of intellectual pessimism. He was
depressed because in this new and more spontaneous world, so full of
undreamed-of beauties, so exquisitely stimulating to his new powers of
appreciation, he had found something which he did not understand.
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