His restless wanderings brought him at length to the bay-window, and he looked out into the night. The storm had not abated. Dimly he could perceive, in the light streaming outward from the window, the rain-washed steps, the pale balustrades and statues of the garden; the near cypresses, too, bowed and straining in the gale which shrieked across the open lawns and bellowed hoarsely in the woodland like some fierce beast let loose. And Laurence, viewing this tumult and listening to it, suffered further humiliation. He became but a small thing in his own estimation, weak, futile, incapable. For to what, after all, did his force of will and power of compelling events amount? He thought of Armstrong, the level-headed and circumspect Scotch agent; of his uncle, dignified, and even in mortal illness faithful to the clear purposes of his long life. He thought of Virginia, strong in virtue of her very limitations, glittering as a well-cut jewel, concrete, complete. All these persons occupied a definite place, served, in their degree, a definite end. Whereas, for himself, was he not the veriest sport of nature and of circumstance, endowed with just sufficient wit, sufficient talent, to court failure in any and every direction? His initiative, that had lately showed god-like, now shrivelled to microscopic proportions; while a further unwelcome question presented itself. For had the gracious spectre--he no longer quarrelled with that definition--lived, as he had fondly supposed, through his life, regained reason and glad, human sympathy through the influence of his will, or had the case, in very truth, been precisely the reverse? Had not she been the active, he the merely passive principle? Had he not reached a higher development, and gloried--for a little space--in conscious possession of genius, had he not lived, in short, through her--and this not by exercise of direct intention on her part, but merely in obedience to the might of her love for another man--a man long dead, but whose name he chanced to bear, and whose appearance he chanced to resemble?
And thereupon a hideous persuasion of his own nullity and emptiness took hold of Laurence. Individuality fled away, disintegrated, dissolved, and was not. The component parts of his physical being returned to their original elements--flesh to earth, gases to air, heat to fire, blood to water. While all the qualities of his mind, his tastes and affections, suffered like dispersal, being claimed and absorbed by the members of those many generations, whose earthly existence had contributed to the eventual production of his own. And the terror of this was augmented, in that, although every atom of his being was thus scattered and appropriated, every smallest fraction of that which had gone to compose his personality was dispersed, yet annihilation of thought did not follow. He was reduced to absolute nothingness; but knowledge of disintegration, knowledge of loss, knowledge--rebellious and despairing--of that same nothingness remained.